True North
by altschmerz
Summary: (AU: James stayed, slow burn found family) When Jack gets a call from old friend Matty Webber, telling him about a job opportunity with an organization called 'DXS', recently having had some personnel turnover, he isn't sure what to expect. Certainly not his partner, his new boss Director James MacGyver's son, or the way this partnership is going to change his life - and Mac's.
1. Something New

well here it is folks. my deep dive au that i've been working on for literal months. will be posting as often as i can keep a chapter buffer, as i'm writing and editing five chapters ahead, likely once a week or more. chapter promo images, giving a hint as to what's coming, posted the day before the chapter is uploaded on tumblr, where i can be found at altschmerzes.

this fic is my baby, and i hope you like it. drop me a line, let me know what you think, and happy reading.

(for those of you playing along with the playlist at home, title is from sleeping at last's 'page 28').

* * *

Everything about the exterior of DXS is designed so as to be perfectly evocative of a think-tank. Jack's eyebrows climb steadily up as he rounds the winding side road towards the building. It looks more like a modern art exhibit than a building - tall struts of shiny metal add stability to banks of massive windows that seem like a structurally questionable decision for an architect to make regarding an office in earthquake-riddled Southern California. The grass is a bright, friendly green, studded with benches and carefully maintained sidewalks. There are no big signs announcing the name of the place, either the truth or a cover, though he can easily picture one, a tasteful block of sandstone near the road to the parking lot, carved with _Smart Place Where Smart People Work._ Okay, maybe not _that_, but some kind of lofty sounding name like _The Something Or Other Institute _or _The Fancy Last-Name Group._ Something high brow and think tank-y and not at all in his wheelhouse. It's enough to almost give a man second thoughts.

In all, he wasn't sure what he was expecting out of the home base of his new, super secret, probably super dangerous job, but this… wasn't it. Then again, Jack muses, pulling into a spot near the front doors, that's probably the point.

There's a handful of people milling about outside, coming in or heading home or on break, and it's so strikingly normal that he hopes he's in the right place and not about to fall prey to an elaborate prank from an old friend with an odd sense of humor.

When Matilda Webber had first told him about this, Jack had been sure she was messing with him. Department of External Services. _DXS._ It sounds so much like something out of a blockbuster Marvel movie that he couldn't believe it was a real place where real people worked. Where Matty wanted _him_ to work.

The offer came out of the blue, at the end of the short-term consulting gig he'd been doing with the NCIS office in Los Angeles. He'd only been puttering about the promenades and beaches for less than a day, killing time in gorgeous coastal California before the next request for an assist on a particularly tricky or grueling mission came his way when the phone rang. It was Matty Webber, a friend from far back enough in the day that her number wasn't programmed into his newest phone, and he could only guess as to how she got ahold of the number. One thing led to another, and there he was, having pulled up at a public park, wondering if he got the address wrong or if Matty had finally cracked in the years since they last saw each other.

"Hey, I'm here," he said into the phone, squinting over rolling green lawn and tennis courts. "Where are you?" A moment after he asked it, Jack spotted a lone figure with long, dark hair sitting still at a picnic table, two coffee cups set out in front of her. "Never mind, I see you."

Matty looked up when he reached the table and gestured for him to take a seat on the bench opposite hers. Jack did so with a skeptical look around. Poor visibility of threat angles, a dozen escape routes going in all directions, the possibility of being overheard by a bunch of teenagers playing frisbee with a degree of delight and distraction indicating they were most if not all stoned out of their skulls… Overall, not an ideal meeting place to discuss the kind of business that Jack and Matty have had cause to discuss over the time they'd known one another.

"Is there a reason we're doing this _here?"_ he asked eventually. Matty rolled her eyes and pushed the yet-untouched coffee cup towards him. Jack eyed the Starbucks logo, then picked it up and took a cautious sip. "I don't know if I should be flattered or worried that it's been how long since we worked together and you still remember exactly what I do to my coffee."

"You should be flattered, and we're doing this here because it's a nice day and the entire three weeks I've been at my new job I've been stuck inside at a desk untangling a genuinely impressive mountain of red tape and paperwork left behind by my predecessor's untimely departure." Matty's tone was exactly as sharp and acerbic as Jack remembered it being, and it was paradoxically calming to his nerves.

Since he returned from his stint as an EOD overwatch, and once he was finished with the time spent on the family land in Texas, helping his mother with all the projects around the house he always swore he'd get on but never did, Jack's life had been one temporary project after another. His reputation preceded him, but while the offers of consulting jobs weren't scarce, neither were they permanent, and the constant moving and changing was beginning to wear him down. To see Matty here today, and have her be exactly as he remembered her, it was a breath of fresh, familiar air.

And then there was the matter of _why_ he was seeing her. The mysterious opportunity she'd called about, the one she'd referred to as 'the chance of a lifetime' and then absolutely refused to tell him anything more about until they were able to meet in person.

"So," Jack said, setting the coffee cup down and meeting her constantly evaluating, measuring gaze straight on. "What's going on, Matty? Why am I here?"

The primer on DXS and the news that there was yet another mysterious government-run body watchdogging the safety of the known world from an unobtrusive corner of Southern California is not the strangest part of the tale Matty spins for him. It's a tale that begins with the day she got a phone call from a man she knew back even before she and Jack had worked together. This man, an old work colleague she owed in a way that was too serious and deep to discuss with any degree of detail, had told her of an organization in crisis and asked for her help, calling in that old favor. James MacGyver, Director of the Department of External Services, had called Matty asking her to take the recently and traumatically vacated spot as Deputy Director, after the discovery that his agency had been breached by a double agent, infiltrated by a group known only as 'the Organization'.

"So when Director MacGyver discovered what had happened," Matty said, laying the whole unbelievable tale out with an air of near-boredom implying the novelty of the wild situation wears off once you spend enough time filling out forms in triplicate about it, "he went through DXS with a fine-toothed comb. Anybody whose story or credentials or conduct gave him even a hint of a reason to suspect they were involved with the breach, or knew about it, or _could've_ known about it and missed it, was fired immediately. Some of them were brought up on charges, and that's still being sorted out. One of the people who was ousted as a result was his previous Deputy Director, Patricia Thornton." Catching sight of his bare-faced shock, Matty held up a hand before Jack could ask. "Yes, it's the Thornton you're thinking of, and no, I can't hardly believe it myself. But here I am, sitting at her desk, trying to figure out how to put this agency back together after the whole place got torn apart and turned inside out."

Swallowing past his surprise and putting aside the issue of the name 'Thornton' for another time, Jack focused on the more pressing point at hand.

"Why do I get the feeling you didn't just explain all of that because you have a fondness for storytelling."

"You're right," Matty admitted immediately. "That isn't why at all. I explained all of that because it's necessary background for what I'm going to say next. I have a job offer for you."

"Job offer," repeated Jack back to her, voice blank. He'd have listed any of a dozen assumptions about this meeting before he'd have gotten remotely in the vicinity of 'job offer'.

"Well, it's half job offer, half a favor. Really, it's me doing _you_ a favor if you think about it. DXS lost good people after the Director…" Matty trailed off, eyes doing a circuit of the park's perimeter as she searched, most likely, for a delicate way to phrase things. "Cleaned house. As it stands, his top agent is currently without a partner." There was a pointed tone to the end of that sentence, and one of her eyebrows arched up, and Jack wished he was a little less good at putting two and two together.

"And you want me to come be this 'top agent's partner? What makes you think I'm the right fit? Or that I'd even want to?"

"Because you haven't had a steady position since you got discharged and you're only going to be able to stand living like this, anchorless and drifting around as the on-call handyman of the international security world, for so long. You need a purpose. A challenge. And I've got one. DXS, we need a guy like you, and you? You need a job like DXS. You don't have the stomach for anything less. Am I wrong?"

It seems rather too on the nose, hitting far too close to the mark for the time and distance that's separated what was once a firm friendship and what they are now. They'd worked well together back in the day, but it's been years, and the last assignment they'd been on as a team hadn't ended pretty. It hadn't destroyed their relationship, but it came close, and Jack still wasn't quite sure where they stood with each other. He didn't think it was on the kind of ground from which a person said things like that.

"You're not wrong," Jack said finally, because she wasn't. Matty wasn't wrong, she knew too much about him to believe he could live like he was living for long. He did need a purpose, a challenge, and it looked like she might be about to hand it to him. "Tell me about this top agent. The one who needs a partner."

Still sitting for the moment in his car outside the front doors of DXS, Jack glances at the passenger's seat of his car. Or, more accurately, at the unassuming manilla folder sitting in the passenger's seat. Matty had brought it with her that day to the park and pulled it out of her bag when he'd asked about the agent he was to be partnered with, like she'd known beforehand that he was going to agree. He reaches over and flicks the folder open, taking a look again at the brief profile that Matty had stuck in before a few after-action reports, to give him something of an idea of what he was getting into.

Angus MacGyver. That had been the first indication that something was up with this new partner he's signing up for. The top agent, the one Matty recruited him to work with, has the same last name as the Director of DXS.

"The _nepotism_ _kid?"_ Jack can still hear himself asking, incredulously, over the phone when he'd got home that night, had time to put two and two together. "Your amazing job offer, the one that's doing _me_ a favor really, is babysitting the nepotism kid? I can't believe you got me involved in this just to get me assigned to the _nepotism kid."_ Nepotism had begun to stop sounding like a real word, but Jack couldn't help but repeat himself, the idea was so ludicrous.

Matty had defended the agent, this 'Angus MacGyver', and her decision to get him involved, saying that Jack should reserve judgement until he actually met the young man in question. Apparently, there was a lot more to him than his last name, but Jack still finds himself doubtful, squinting at the building, banks of windows reflecting bright late morning light. It's so deceptively shiny, like the surface of a lake that goes deeper than anyone could possibly fathom. Every inch of his rationality, his critical thinking, is telling him there's more to this assignment, and this nepotism kid, than meets the eye, but not necessarily in the way Matty meant.

Figuring there's nothing else for it - and people are gonna start to think something's up if he sits here in his car and stares at the building for too much longer - Jack turns the car off and gets out, leaving the information folder there on the passenger's seat. After all, he's about to meet the real deal soon.

There's an assistant waiting for him when Jack enters the lobby. She gives him a bland smile, doesn't introduce herself, says, "Director MacGyver's waiting for you," and turns around to walk back down the hall before stopping to verify if he's following. Jack moves after her, jogging a little to keep up when his attention is pulled away from the new environment by the realization that his guide is leaving him behind.

As he follows the assistant down the hall, Jack notices people paying absolutely no attention to him in the most conspicuously deliberate way possible. Heads stay ramrod straight as he passes, no casual swing to the side to track the movements of the newcomer in an office that likely doesn't see many of those. At the same time, eyes flick to the side once then snap back to stare intently at conversational partners, conversations themselves dimming then rising again when he passes. It's way more of a spectacle, disguised though it may be, than a new recruit warrants, even here, so Jack figures it must be something to do with his partner. They all know he's here to babysit the nep- excuse him, _DXS's top agent_, and it makes him big news on campus, he figures.

Around the next corner, and there he is, the man himself. There's no mistaking James MacGyver, even without the placard in the wall next to his shoulder reading DIRECTOR. Every inch of his posture and dress radiates understated control, a man without a question of where he stands in the world. He stands leaning against a door jamb outside his office, glancing every few moments down at his watch, with a kind of banal impatience that Jack recognizes from bureaucrats everywhere. Surreptitiously, Jack glances down at his own watch, just to be sure he isn't late.

It's ten fifty-two in the morning. Jack's introductory meeting with the Director and his new partner was scheduled for eleven. He's early, which is industry on time, which means there shouldn't be a problem. Shaking his head as if to dispel any kind of nervousness over an infraction he hasn't actually committed, Jack holds his chin up, schools his expression, and walks right up to his new boss.

"Ah, you must be Webber's magic bullet," the man says. Calculating blue eyes sweep over Jack, evaluating him head to toe, and the back of Jack's neck prickles. Matty hates when people just call her 'Webber'. "Director MacGyver. Pleasure."

"Likewise," Jack says, drawl seeping into the word more strongly than it usually would. "Jack Dalton." He accepts Director MacGyver's offered hand and shakes it, barely managing to withhold a cringe at the strength of the Director's grip. It never made sense to him, what breaking a new aquaintence's hand was supposed to prove.

Whatever it was his new boss was looking for, he must have found it, because he nods once and lets go of Jack's hand.

"Now, this would be the part where I would introduce you to your partner," Director MacGyver sighs, looking around as if the man in question might be hiding somewhere in the nearly-deserted hallway. Even the assistant has quietly vanished in the way that assistants do, melting away to take care of some other vital task without which the organization would fail terribly, before anyone else even knew it needed doing. "Except that it would seem my son has misplaced his watch, or his calendar, or maybe his brain."

Unsure how to take that, Jack just smiles awkwardly, hoping he'll get ahold of the Director's sense of humor before not knowing how to take things gets him in trouble. Luckily, the Director moves on quickly.

"At any rate," he says, briskly moving on from the comment and the irritation at MacGyver the junior's tardiness, "we can get started without him. Lots going on around here, lots to see."

The tour of DXS starts with the Director making a sweeping gesture off down the hall, towards a number of doors marked with the same kind of placard decorating his.

"This is where the offices for upper management are, this one's mine, you've got Deputy Director Webber's across the hall," his hand passes through the air as if swiping a palm across the closed door indicated. "We've had some turnover lately, in all our departments, some heads have been replaced, I'm sure Deputy Director Webber filled you in on most of that. Things have started to settle down now, though, and with your instatement as Angus's partner things should be back in ship-shape in no time."

"About that turnover," Jack says, looking around the hall and trying to sound casual. He neglects to bring up that he isn't even sure if he's taking the position yet, some last reservations holding him back. "The mole problem. How worried do we still need to be about that?"

The Director dismisses the question with a wave of his hand, shaking his head along with it. "Not worried. The 'mole problem', as you put it, has been thoroughly addressed. Nothing you need to be concerned with. Your role here will be exclusively as Angus's partner, you know. His Overwatch, essentially, which according to Webber you have experience with, make sure he doesn't get himself killed or tank the mission because he doesn't notice some glaring threat. He's highly intelligent and very good at his job, but he needs watching, you know, like all exceptional agents, he gets tunnel vision. Misses the forest for the trees- No, misses the forest for the specific pine needle on the ground next to the tree. That's where you come in."

"Got it," Jack says shortly. That description doesn't exactly instill a lot of faith in him, but he's willing to reserve judgement until he actually meets the agent in question. Maybe his father is just being overprotective.

"Good. Now, down there's the head of exfil, you probably won't talk to him much, exfil shows up when you need 'em and disappears just as fast, and then our chief of medical, you'll probably see him more often..."

It goes on, with a handful of other leaders of departments Jack is pretty sure he'll have little if any contact with, if this job is one that ends up sticking.

It's that thought that dogs his steps as he follows Director MacGyver through the building, the question of this job sticking. It feels different than the consulting gigs he's been bouncing around since shipping home, the unmoored bouncing from Texas to New York to DC to California. If he takes this job, if this meeting goes well, and he commits, then he's in it. He's stuck in this building with this partner he has yet to meet, stuck in California, hundreds of miles away from his family in Texas. But there's something about just being in this building, following this man as he shows Jack past the elevator downstairs to the shooting range and the tactical gear storage, that makes his heart beat a little faster.

The Director gestures down a hall towards interrogation and interview rooms, just different enough to warrant different names, and Jack holds his head up a little higher. He points out a gym, containing two sparring agents, and Jack's stride grows a little longer. There's something about being here that feels right, and if it's that he was born for this kind of work or that he's too stuck in it by now to be able to adjust to a normal life, Jack doesn't know. Either way, here he is, and here he's going to stay. He needs this job and, according to Matty, this job needs him.

Just as he's about to hit the button for the elevator that will take them to another floor, Director MacGyver stops what he's doing, instead fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket. One glance at the screen and the man's face tightens somewhat, irritation but disguised, just barely carelessly enough that Jack caught it.

"It would seem that your new partner has deigned to join us, and will be to Conference F shortly, if you'd like to follow me that way."


	2. You'd Better Jump Ship

well well well folks, welcome to chapter two! i'm trying to keep a good five chapter buffer up of written and edited fic, and it's been going swimmingly so far - guess people wanting to read this brainchild of mine is motivating me to write it faster! anyhow, enjoy chapter two, and drop me a line if you liked it! (ps, for those following along my writing playlist for this fic, this chapter titled from electric president's "we were never built to last".)

* * *

Agent Angus MacGyver arrives in the conference room and subsequently Jack's life twenty minutes late and out of breath like he'd run the entire way there. He's blond, with the same blue eyes as his father, and he looks like he's _maybe_ sixteen years old, gangly like a colt that hasn't quite grown into its legs yet. When his arm moves back, guiding the door to swing shut, the side of his brown jacket slips up and Jack is taken sharply aback by the sight of a gun strapped to the boy's hip, harsh lines of dark metal a stark contrast to the rumpled cotton of his blue button-up. He looks too young to have a gun, let alone know how to use it.

_Babysitting the nepotism kid,_ Jack thinks incredulously. _This is unbelievable. Matty literally has me babysitting._

The kid doesn't spare a glance for Jack, looking immediately at the Director - at his father, Jack supposes.

"Sorry," he says, and he sounds just as breathless as he looks. He doesn't look especially guilty or remorseful, though. Just maybe a shade anxious. One hand goes down to his side to tap at the leg of his pants, fingers twitching restlessly. When he comes in contact with the gun, MacGyver Junior cringes, switching hands, tapping at the leg without the weapon strapped to it. He acts like he isn't used to the weapon, surprised to find it there.

"Excuse us for a moment," the Director says to Jack, tone placating and tight like an overworked host conducting midnight check-in at a hotel.

His smile then disappears as he opens the conference room door and steps out into the hall, gesturing for Agent MacGyver to join him. He does, and the two of them stand just outside the door, conducting a hushed conversation Jack can't help but overhear. The floor to ceiling glass windows that compose this particular conference room aren't exactly soundproof, and Jack is not too shabby at lipreading.

"Where were you? You were supposed to be here half an hour ago." The Director's voice is tight and tinged with both irritation and embarrassment.

"I know, I know, I was down in Research, Whittacker and Tam were having an issue with the-" Agent MacGyver's hands flutter in front of him, waving in thoughtless circles as he speaks, only to still sharply when he's cut off.

"I'm sorry, do you work in Research? Did I assign you to R and D and then forget about it?" The most dangerous kind of question. One that needs no answer, already having its own foregone conclusion, but demanding one anyway.

"No, but-"

"Then why were you down there when you were supposed to be up here meeting the guy who's going to keep your ass alive on your assignments? That is, if we can even persuade him to take the job after you've just demonstrated a flagrant lack of respect for his time and effort. You have to take this seriously, Angus, this isn't science camp and you aren't ten."

Jack closes his eyes and stifles a groan, breaking his focus on the hushed conversation happening outside. This is just fantastic. The nepotism kid messes around in the tech lab all day and shows up half an hour late to important meetings. Not what he'd been hoping for in a partner, not in this line of work. Even granting that this was the young son of his somewhat uptight boss, Jack had expected different. When he sees her next, he and Matty are going to have a _lot_ to talk about. That is, if his partner doesn't get him killed in the interim.

After just long enough that Jack's neck is starting to feel stiff from the awkward tension, the Director and his new partner re-enter the room. The Director's jaw is tense and his apologetic smile is tight, body language rigid and displeased. There's a light flush sitting high on the young agent's cheeks as he trails in after the older man. He looks like a chastised child and it's not a reassuring appearance for an agent to have, especially one Jack is about to be asked to put his life in the hands of on missions.

"I apologize, Mr. Dalton," the elder says. "Let me introduce you to your new partner, my best agent. This is my son, Angus MacGyver."

There's a slightly lofty tone to the way the Director presents him, a tilt to his chin and a quirk to the corner of his mouth, a pride Jack can see as it seeps in every corner of the man. It's the same look Jack has seen at old car shows. Never on the faces of the mechanics with oil under their fingernails, standing beside retooled machines they spent hours, years rebuilding, but on the faces of the styled men in business suits, hair shinier than the cars they stand beside, cars that always manage to somehow, in their lines and harshness, look angry. No sooner has the thought occurred to him but Jack is shaking it away, a little embarrassed by the grandiose analogy. Maybe he's judging the Director too hard and without enough reason, reading too much into a father being proud of the achievements of his son.

"Nice to meet you, Agent MacGyver," Jack says, forcing any thoughts of car shows and weird feelings out of his mind. He holds out his hand, and the kid looks at it blankly for a second before jolting into action like a robot malfunctioning, accepting the offered shake. He doesn't grip like the Director had, like he was trying to demonstrate… something, by squeezing the life out of Jack's hand, and that's gotta be something, at least.

"Hi," his new partner says back, and nothing more than that.

"Alright," announces James after a few beats of uncomfortable silence hang over the three of them. He looks around, peering out the door and down the hall like he's waiting on someone to come around the corner, some new obligation to make itself known, urgent and abrupt. "I'll leave Angus here to finish up your tour, let the two of you get to know each other a little."

With that, he's gone, the door of the conference room swinging shut behind him with a whisper, polished glass edges fitting together so neatly there's barely a sound. Jack is left standing alone in a room with Angus MacGyver and absolutely no idea what to say to him.

"Your dad's told me a lot about you on our little walk-around," he says, keeping his face at a careful baseline of a neutral-positive, polite smile. Maybe flattery will help defuse some of the odd tension in the room - the kid's gotta be used to people kissing his ass, given who his father is. "He says you're the best there is, and I'm lucky to be working with you."

Jack's new partner's eyes narrow and his mouth tugs downward in distaste. Not the result he'd been going for. Exactly the opposite of the result he'd been going for, actually, and not one he would've predicted, given the prompting.

"He didn't say that," MacGyver the younger says. The statement is without inflection, no defensiveness or accusation, merely a fact.

Which, Jack supposes, is fair, because no, the Director _hadn't_ said that, or anything of the sort. They'd barely spoken about MacGyver at all on their partial tour of the building, in fact, aside from the first remark about his lateness to the meeting. How MacGyver himself came to that conclusion, however, means one of two things. Either Jack is a much more terrible liar than the fact that he's survived undercover assignments for years would indicate is possible, or… Something else.

"Okay," he admits, watching MacGyver's face carefully, looking for changes, hints at how he'd known. "You're right. He didn't."

The room lapses back into that stiff, unnatural silence. Jack can't remember a time he had a first day of work get off to this unexpectedly rocky of a start, not even when his first day of work was in an actual warzone. At least when he was working Overwatch with EOD overseas he and his newly assigned tech would _know_ that by the end of the day they'd likely be getting shot at together. That has a way of getting you to put aside your differences with a person, at least enough to do your job effectively. Now, though, the highest stakes Jack and Agent MacGyver are looking down the barrel at together is the other end of a half-finished tour of the building.  
It leaves a lot more room for stony silence, that's for sure, room that MacGyver seems to be capitalizing on in spades. He's not even looking at Jack, gaze trained somewhere past Jack's shoulder, and with a stubbornness to match his youth, he isn't talking. Deciding that at least one of them has to be the adult here, and it's clearly not going to be this kid, Jack straightens his shoulders. He plasters on what he hopes is a chagrined enough smile that the lie he'd been caught in will be if not forgotten then at least forgiven, and tries again.

"So," he says, in a friendly tone he hopes MacGyver won't instantly see through as forced, "about the rest of that tour then?"

The tour is not a hell of a lot more comfortable than just standing in that room had been, but at least there's a focus to it, and at least MacGyver is talking now. He leads Jack around the areas of the building he and the Director hadn't gotten to yet, pointing out the wing almost exclusively occupied by exfil's facilities, separated from the main offices by a door without any windows or markings on it.

From there, they head down a staircase to the very point of contention their first meeting had started on - R & D. MacGyver's face visibly lights up when they reach the labs, and people start greeting him by name as they pass. Upstairs, nobody had really said much, making a few seconds of eye contact and passing by quickly. Once or twice, someone waved and said hello, but that was the extent of the socializing they'd done with the agents.

"Hey, Mac," says a woman with buzzed short dark hair and a turtleneck sweater, and MacGyver actually smiles back at her, stepping towards the doorway she's standing in. She'd gotten up and darted to the door when she'd caught sight of them, grinning. Behind her are rows of computers on desks, and Jack catches a glimpse of satellite information spread across screens, coordinates and data flashing by too quickly for him to make heads or tails of. The woman talks to MacGyver in quiet, excited tones, a background hum faded into the sound of the banks of computer monitors. Jack looks over right as she glances over at him, and her mouth snaps shut.

"Hi," she says to him, grin faded, leaving behind it an uncertain look of 'should I be nervous or shouldn't I'. "You're the new agent, huh?"

"That's me," Jack answers mildly. "The new agent. Jack Dalton."

"Nice to meet you, Agent Dalton," she says, making no move to shake his hand or introduce herself at all. Instead, she turns back to MacGyver, and says to him, in the rushed, stilted tones of a person who's been interrupted by someone who wasn't supposed to hear the contents of the conversation, "Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks, y'know, for the help, and things seem alright now."

She steps back into the room without another look at Jack, and MacGyver doesn't explain what kind of help she'd been thanking him for, or what things weren't alright before that were now.

There's not a lot in the rest of the hallway, just more rooms of computer technicians, working on digital forensics and long-distance intel gathering. The computer operations are based out of the second sublevel - more easily temperature controlled for sensitive equipment than an above-ground floor - and the building designers seem to have done their best to make it seem as sunny as possible. The walls are a light, faint yellow, like faded out ochre, and the lights aren't the kind of fluorescent cafeteria lighting Jack is used to seeing in government buildings of any kind. They've got a pretty decent setup here at DXS, as far as the building went, so the job had that going for it at least.

At the end of the hallway Agent MacGyver stops abruptly, dead in his tracks so fast that Jack nearly runs right into him. There's nothing around them but the door to an out of the way stairwell and some unobtrusively painted sections of wall, no one around to hear whatever it is the kid's about to say. And, judging by the set to his jaw and the way his eyes flit around the entire featureless hallway before landing on Jack's face, making steely eye contact, it's not going to be anything good.

"If I were you," the kid says finally, "I wouldn't get too comfortable."

Jack's eyebrows shoot up, incredulous. "Excuse me?"

"Here. At least in this role. My partners don't… They don't last long."

It makes Jack want to scoff, to look around for cameras in case he accidentally got hired at some reality show or soap opera instead of a covert agency. Except that the tone MacGyver spoke in is enough to give him pause. It's not dramatic, or lofty, lacking the kind of teen-like angst the words themselves imply. Instead, MacGyver just sounds… bored. He sounds bored and exhausted and flat enough that it can't be anything other than a plain truth, and Jack finds himself wondering how many of these tours he's given.

"I've had four this year," MacGyver says, answering his unasked question, still in that tired, bored voice. "You're lucky number five. Or you are at least until you quit, or get transferred, or… something. Whatever. Just don't get too used to anything, is all I'm saying. You're not going to last."

That last bit, bored or not, sounds like a challenge, and it makes Jack square his shoulders. He's never been one to back down from a challenge, and a job he was unsure he wanted not twenty minutes ago is starting to look like a really enticing opportunity. One he's going to excel at. _You're not going to last, he says,_ Jack thinks. _We'll see about that. _There's a reason Matty asked _him_ to do this, rather than any of the dozen of people she knew that she could've recruited to take this place. He doesn't scare easy, and she was right. A challenge is exactly what he needs.

"Alright," is all he says in return, eyeing the kid and wondering what type of a person it takes to go through four partners in a year, whether it was their idea or MacGyver's demand or the Director's verdict that sent them packing. Maybe some combination. "Let's just finish the tour, okay?"

MacGyver turns away without a word and heads up the stairs.

Jack runs into Matty on his way out that day, sitting on the front lawn with her face turned up towards the sky. She looks like she's enjoying a moment of calm in a storm, a rare instance of stillness, and Jack would hate to interrupt that when it seems like she's not getting much of it these days. He's all set to go on his way, drive home and process what he'd seen and heard and who he'd met on his own, when Matty speaks.

"Don't just stand there, Dalton, have a seat." She doesn't so much as open her eyes, still leaned back on the bench, posture relaxed.

Jack does as he's told and sits down next to her. He's got to admit it's a nice day outside, and the sun is a welcome change from the artificial if tastefully chosen lighting inside of DXS.

"So how was the first day?" Matty asks. "How was meeting the Director?"

"Never mind the Director," Jack says, unable to help himself now that the opportunity has been offered to him. "What kind of actual babysitting gig did you get me signed up for? My 'partner', Matty, is about fifteen years old-"

"Twenty-three."

"Oh _that's_ better. He's legal to drink, but if we ever need to rent a car the premiums are going to be through the roof. And he's had four partners this year? _Four_?"

"I know." It's said with a sigh, and Matty's eyes open now. She turns to look at him, and she looks tired. "And I still don't have the full story on all of them, the partners he's had, but he's not some primadonna demanding his partner be replaced every time they're not instant besties, okay? There are reasons. His last partner was fired when the Director cleared house, I told you. The one before that was transferred by the Director, and I think the one before that quit after their first mission together." Matty frowns, squinting into the middle distance and tilting her head. "Or was it the other way around. Regardless, my point is, if it were anybody else, I would take a look at that track record and say run, run for the hills."

"But you're not, you're saying 'come work here, Jack, come work with the nepotism kid who goes through partners like my momma's dog goes through rawhide, really it's a favor to _you_ to bring this job to you'."

Matty's withering look indicates she didn't necessarily appreciate his half-hearted imitation of her voice, but the fact that she doesn't make him regret it further indicates she must be even more tired than she appears.

"Yes, that's what I'm saying." She shakes her head and looks back out away. There's a woman walking slowly down the path at the edge of the lawn, looking up at the sky and meandering like she has all the time in the world. Matty's eyes track the woman for a long time, an odd expression on her face. "I'm telling you, Jack, that kid, the 'nepotism kid', as you keep calling him, he's something else. Put him with the right partner, and who knows. I've never met anyone like him before. It's like he exists on a whole different planet, and whatever he sees there, it makes him see what's here differently."

"He's really that good?" Jack tries not to sound too skeptical.

Matty turns her attention back towards him and says nothing for a long moment. Her eyes, piercing and direct, are evaluating, measuring, searching for something. He can remember this look. It's one she'd given him often, back in the day, and he's never been able to figure it out - what exactly it is she's looking for, or if she ever found it. He can't figure it out this time, either, and maybe it's for the better that he doesn't know.

"No, he's not," Matty says finally. "He's better."


	3. Every Step Forward (Take Two Steps Back)

alrighty here's where it finally kicks into gear! there's some canon typical levels of violence in this chapter fyi, and the warning applies here on out, as missions happen.

thanks so much for your support so far and please don't hesitate to drop me a line or come say hi on tumblr, i'm at altschmerzes!

chapter title from we the kings' 'ally'.

* * *

The first mission that Jack goes on with Agent MacGyver goes unremarkably. It's a pretty lowball assignment if Jack were to give his honest opinion on the matter, though he can't say that's entirely a bad idea. Coming out the gate with a brand new, untested partner, especially one as totally unreadable as MacGyver, is enough to make Jack nervous enough already, he can't imagine his nerves would've survived if it had been fate of the world huge on top of that. As it stood, it was a simple information retrieval, get in, get a zip drive stuck under the lip of a planter containing a fake fern, get out again.

There's only one moment where things get rocky, and it's entirely interpersonal. On the plane in, sitting across from his new partner, Jack makes the mistake of calling the kid by his first name. _Angus._ It's a ridiculous name, but Jack supposes MacGyver himself can hardly be blamed, so he was going to try. The moment the name left his mouth, though, he knew he'd made a mistake. MacGyver's shoulders go rigid and the muscles of his jaw clench, communicating without a word that Jack has just made a major misstep.

"Okay," he says slowly, carefully. MacGyver hasn't bit his head off or snapped or _said_ anything to indicate he doesn't want to be called by his first name, at least not by Jack, but he doesn't have to say. His body language is enough. "Not Angus then. Can't just keep calling you MacGyver though, not with two of y'all running around, and if it's all the same to you, I'm gonna save full names for my boss."

No answer except a very slight roll of MacGyver's eyes, like he thinks Jack is being ridiculous.

"Mac," Jack settles on eventually. "I bet that's what your friends call you, yeah?"

Now, MacGyver does answer. His head snaps over to look at Jack directly and after a few moments of quiet, he says, "Yeah. It is." He doesn't, however, follow that up by saying that he and Jack aren't friends, and so obviously the nickname is off limits. Either he doesn't much care who uses it, or he's warming up to his new coworker. Regardless, Jack will take it.

"Okay then," he says. He has a feeling not unlike the one you get after successfully navigating a theoretically nonthreatening piece of land that nevertheless may contain a landmine. MacGyv- ...Mac looks away, back down at some book open in his lap, nothing to do with the mission at hand. And it's smooth sailing from there.

Their second mission is similarly nondescript. Were he asked even as shortly as a month later, Jack is sure he won't be able to recall details, for the simple fact that there aren't many to recall.

The third mission is where it all goes straight to hell.

It seems, at first, like it's going to be just as fine as the first two had been. All the intel is laid out there in those nice neat folders Matty is so fond of, not a page out of place or piece of information missing. Mac has his folder spread open on the table in front of him on the jet, studying building blueprints that Jack knows he's already been over half a dozen times, index finger of his right hand tracing entrance and exit routes while the fingers of his left tap out an absentminded rhythm against the armrest of his seat. He's focused intently, forehead crinkled in a way that strikes Jack with the absent thought that he's going to be left with permanent worry-lines before he's thirty.

As Jack watches him study the map, Mac's hand, the one tracing the paths, leaves the page and comes up to absently cup the side of his neck, rubbing at it like the muscle aches. Probably the angle he's got it at, going over those papers. Makes Jack's own neck hurt just to look at it, so he looks away, back down at his own folder. He wonders, thumbing the thing open again, how many successful training wheels missions he and Mac are going to have to run together before they would be allowed to try anything involving any actual risk.

Granted, this one is a step up from the first two, and he understands the need to test out a new partnership - no promise of Matty's would ever measure up to his own display of skill and focus - but Jack is beginning to chafe at retrievals. This will be the third straightforward retrieval they've gone on in a row, and he's tired of it.

They're headed to Croatia, to a semi-abandoned building that contained DXS hardware from when an international arms dealing operation had been actively using it to house both workers and hardware. It wasn't an extremely successful operation, so they'd not moved on it while they were able to use the shipments to track other, more dangerous targets, but one thing it had going for it was the tendency of those in charge to be very careful about their safe houses. They were moved every so often, the entire enterprise scooped up and transplanted somewhere else as soon as the bosses started to get fidgety. When this happens, DXS needs to go in and retrieve their surveillance equipment before it can be found as the building is cleared out and its contents catalogued.

That is where he and Mac are being dispatched to now, to scrub the nearly abandoned hideout of DXS's presence before it can be discovered. When the organization, headed by a man named Simon Halilovic, moved on to a new location, they returned periodically to the old one, clearing out remaining items until all that was left was a stray corner of paper here and there, maybe a forgotten cable. This didn't hold very high priority, so they tended to ship out low-level recruits to handle the cleanup, and it was only every few days. Recently, they've grown sloppy. Predictable. Forgetting to vary intervals and allowing DXS to foresee when the last stronghold, what used to be a small office building, long since abandoned of its original purpose, would be empty.

Today is a day they won't be there, and today is the day DXS will scrub every trace of its presence from the building. Jack leans back in his seat and flips another page over, studying the list of equipment to be retrieved. A few button mics. A transmitter in the walls intercepting and cloning incoming communications. A few miscellaneous bits and bobbles from your average middle-grade priority surveillance op. A breeze, in and out in around or under ninety minutes. Mac will head inside while Jack goes around the exterior of the building, snagging the last couple of cameras from the perimeter and keeping an eye out, on the off chance Halilovic's men decide to come early.

The plane lands fine in Croatia, and the drive out to the site itself is easy enough, though weighted in uncomfortable silence. Mac is wordless and stony in the passenger's seat, eyes fixed out the window, watching the countryside. Jack is fine with that. Let him brood all he wants; he'll get tired of the quiet eventually and start opening up, and then maybe they can finally have a little fun on these missions. He focuses for the moment on driving, on parking the car up in the treeline where it can't be seen from the main road.

It's a mild, placid day. Not a breath of wind stirs the long grass Jack wades through at the edge of the forest that creeps further down towards the building every day. It's been years since the building was abandoned from its original purpose and the landscaping caretakers moved on to other jobs, and it shows. He picks over the unstable ground, reaching into a pocket and slipping a specified pair of sunglasses onto his face. The lenses are formed with a special coating allowing him to see the stripe of paint marking the trees with DXS surveillance equipment planted in them.

For all that he'd like to get back to the kind of high-risk high-reward, fast paced work he signed up for, it's a pretty nice day. Walking along the threshold of the foliage, sweeping his head back and forth to look for marked trees, is almost meditative. There's certainly no chatter in his ear to distract him from whatever thoughts might drift by while he walks. He and Mac are equipped with communicators, earpieces and mics, but, not surprisingly, the kid hasn't said anything since they parted at the path to the building. All is quiet on the Western front.

The gunshots shatter the still of the afternoon and Jack's heart stops.

It kicks back into gear again, galloping erratically and quickly evening out into a determined, steady beat as he shuts down any instinctive panic in favor of pragmatism. The shots came from the building, a short burst of three, and no more follow in the moments it takes Jack to cross to the door. He enters gun up, guarding himself, flashlight braced under it. He hisses his partner's name into the mic, and no answer follows it.

It's in the far East hallway he finds the first body. It's one of Halilovic's men, Jack recognizes him from the briefing, one of the grunts sent around to do cleanup. He wasn't supposed to be here. Nobody was supposed to be here. And it would've been better for him if he hadn't been, if the looks of him is any indication. There's a discarded can of what looks to be spray paint on the ground next to him, a burst of neon green across his face, disrupted by the brown-red blood from his broken nose. His chest rises and falls, but the movements are labored and shallow. He's out cold. No longer a threat.

"Mac," Jack says in another harsh whisper. "Agent MacGyver, respond, _now."_

A long moment elapses without an answer. Jack continues down the hall. Passes another body, heaped over on its side. Another one of Halilovac's. He can't tell if this one is breathing and he doesn't stop to check.

"Everything is fine." The response comes belated and almost annoyed sounding, and Jack's grip on his gun spasms momentarily tighter, incredulous.

"Fine? _Fine? _Situation report," he snaps, turning into the last stretch of dusty, worn carpet separating him from the main office, where Mac is supposed to be digging in the wiring to separate what DXS put there from what was there originally. Who knows what he's actually doing, given nothing else that was supposed to be happening was actually going the way it was supposed to be.

Nobody was supposed to be there aside from them, none of Halilovic's people in the area for another two days. If, on the off chance someone aside from he and Jack _did_ approach the building, Mac was supposed to alert him immediately. The unconscious men in the hall, the gunshots, Mac had clearly known they were there. And still, not a word across the mics to the man whose first and most important job was keeping him alive.

Sure, Jack had been outside pulling cameras out of trees, but that wasn't his first job. Not on this mission, or on either of the two before it, had a part of the actual mission been Jack's top priority - his top priority, as he'd been reminded by Matty not that long ago, is ensuring that Mac is able to complete his portion and live to get up and do it again tomorrow. And yet it took the sharp report of gunshots, a wordless mechanical screaming that alerts all within earshot that something terrible has happened, for him to find out that his mission was under threat. That wasn't how it was supposed to go, and Jack is _not_ happy.

Before Mac can comply with the requested sit-rep, the doorway to the interior office crosses into view, and Jack bursts in, gun drawn. Needlessly drawn, it would seem, as the two arms dealers who managed to make it all the way inside, farther than their compatriots Jack had passed on his way in at least, are already downed. Mac stands above them, turned partially away from Jack, shoulders heaving with exerted breath. He looks over and shrugs, dropping the item still hanging in limp, bloodied fingers. It clatters to the floor, and Jack squints at it, trying to make out what Mac seems to have taken out half of Halilovic's people with.

It is, to the best of what he can tell, some kind of decorative statuette that may have once personalized somebody's desk, left over from when this place had been an office building. Marble, maybe, but it's hard to tell, as old and chipped and bloody it now is. Frowning, Jack's eyes go to the gun on the floor next to the man, and then up to Mac's hip, the one facing him. Sure enough, the kid's weapon is still secured there, untouched and useless to have defended him from any of his would-be assailants. There's a strange smear of rusted copper streaked with an electric, lime green on the knee of his jeans, too, and Jack connects it instantly to the man in the hall with the broken nose and the spray paint.

"Still want that situation report?" Mac has the audacity to ask, and Jack closes his eyes before his vision can white out with how angry he is.

"Did you get everything?" Jack grits out rather than answer. It had been a rhetorical question anyway, the one Mac asked - the situation was pretty clear, report or no.

"Yeah. It's done," Mac answers. His voice is tight and strained and he's still turned away. He sounds mad.

What it is _he's_ angry about, Jack doesn't know. Maybe that Jack didn't see them coming, maybe that he had to get his hands dirty, whatever. Regardless, they doesn't have time to stop and figure it out. They've gotta get out of here before Halilovic's men miss a check-in, or more of them arrive. The truck is still parked up in the treeline, with the equipment from Jack's perimeter sweep sitting in a black duffel bag not ten feet from it. All they have to do is pull the last two cameras Jack hadn't gotten to yet down out of the last two trees and they could be off to the exfil pickup location before Halilovic was any the wiser.

"Let's get going," Jack says, turning towards the door. "I've just got two more to grab out of the trees out there and we're good to go."

As he's about to step back through the threshold he's just come through, something makes Jack stop, a hesitation and a question lingering too persistently in his mind to ignore. He pauses in his tracks, looks behind him to where Mac is just beginning to cross the room to follow.

"You're alright, though?" he asks, anger fading as guilt sets in. That should've been his first question. The moment he came through the door, his first question for his partner, who seemed to have just brought a statuette to a gunfight, should have been 'are you hurt'. The reaction he gets is not one he would've predicted, not since he thought they were making actual headway. (But then, seeing as Mac hadn't so much as radioed in when the fighting started, maybe they weren't making nearly as much progress as Jack had hoped.)

"I'm fine," Mac snaps, pulling his jacket tight around his body and glaring at Jack. He motions as if to encourage them both out the door, and just like that, the guilt is gone and the anger is back. "Let's _go._"

"Well, _okay_ then. Let's just get out of here."

Not, in Jack's opinion, a question that warranted such a prickly response, unless Mac took the inquiry into his health as some sort of indication that Jack was trying to undermine his skill. Which hadn't been the point at all, but that's not an argument they have time to have and frankly, Jack doesn't have the patience at the moment either. They're already set for quite the conversation about this little incident later, so that part can wait too.

Jack leads the way out of the building. His senses are on high alert, still rattled from having missed the approach of Halilovic's goons. That's part of the point of having partners - nobody can have eyes everywhere all of the time, and that way there's someone else to let you know when something's gone wrong. It is this way so you can stay safe but also so that you can have their back. Jack, today, had not had his partner's back. Of course, he would've if he'd known, but he didn't. Mac didn't see fit to tell him, and he'd been unable to do his job as a result.

The recalcitrant young man himself follows behind Jack on their way out, making enough sound with his footsteps that it's clear he's still following. Jack doesn't turn around to check on him, too focused on making sure he knows where he's headed, that he doesn't miss any threats on the way. Maybe he should have. Maybe, if he'd known, he would have. But he doesn't, and, facing forward, eyes cast upward, Jack steps out into the bright light of day.

The other two coils left up in the trees are short and easy work, which is good, because Jack's attention is split. His mind's only half on what he's doing, the other half watching for approaching cars or people. Mac stands back by the car, out of sight from where Jack works, and there's no guarantee he'll say anything if he does notice trouble - though perhaps that thought is uncharitable, and Jack regrets it a moment later. Even granted that he hadn't radio'd when Halilovic's men arrived and the altercations started, Jack doesn't believe that Mac would keep information to himself when it could endanger them both. It just doesn't seem possible. Matty would never have brought him onboard if that were the case.

It's not until they're in the car on the way to the exfil site that Jack's guard finally starts to if not come down then at least relax somewhat. The building is far, far in the rearview and his shoulders begin to unknot, muscle tension relaxing as the thrill of the gunshots and the bodies in the building slows into the relief of a mission accomplished, if with a few hiccups along the way.

Mac does not seem to be relaxing at all. He's bunched up in his seat with his arms folded tight, leaning against the door of the car. It's weird posture, closed off and defensive, and if it were any other time, if this were any other partner, if he hadn't just gotten a swiftly and harshly rebuking response when he'd inquired as to Mac's welfare earlier, Jack would've tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe the fight was getting to him - Jack can't forget that throughout the entire violent encounter, through taking down four men on his own, Mac hadn't touched his gun.

Every so often, as he continues the drive towards the exfil pickup site, Jack glances away from the road towards Mac in the passenger's seat. The kid doesn't move from where he sits, watching silently out the window. With the way he's turned, his head angled away, the collar of his jacket is pulled away a bit, exposing the side of his neck.

There's a scar, on the side of Mac's neck, down near his shoulder. It's usually covered by his shirt, and Jack's only caught glimpses of it before, but he can see it now, fairly clearly. It's long, maybe four inches or so until it disappears underneath the back of his jacket, and looks like it's more than a year old, but new enough that it must have happened in the short time he's been an adult. Jack has a moment of wanting to ask, to find out what happened, if maybe this is why he's so cagey after his encounter with Halilovic's lackeys.

But before any ill-advised questions can slip out during an already tense and high-strung day, Mac looks to the side and catches his expression, snapping, "What?"

"Nothing," Jack answers. Annoyance spikes back up and he grits his jaw, focusing on the road. They're only five more minutes away from the exfil site and it passes without a word exchanged between them.

There's nothing more for it once they've reached pickup but to stand there and wait for the helicopter to arrive and take them to the main airport they're leaving Croatia by. Jack paces, while Mac stands next to the car, jacket pulled tight around his body and arms still folded around it. After a few minutes, Jack figures maybe now is as good a time as any to have that conversation about what, exactly, had happened on this mission that needed to never happen again. He wants to know exactly how soon Mac had spotted the strangers approaching, what was going through his mind when he decided that the danger he was in was something his partner didn't need to know about. Jack stops in his pacing, turning back towards the car, hands on his hips, ready to launch into it, when he's stopped.

Mac shifts away, leaning back against the car, and when he lifts his hand from where it was folded against his side to check his watch, something catches Jack's attention. There's something on his palm. Jack narrows his eyes at it, trying to make out what's out of place about the skin of his hand. It looks like paint, or like blood from the fight, but something's not right. It's too fresh.

Mac turns to the side, looking out over his shoulder, and as his jacket lifts, Jack sees it. His shirt is dark enough that it's hard to see unless you know to look for it, but there it is. Blood, more of it, on his side. And not cast-off either, not anything that could've come from the damage inflicted with Mac's knee and the statuette. This is source blood. Mac is bleeding, a red stain spreading out from his side and soaking down into the waist of his pants. Those shots Jack heard, the ones that alerted him to the problem, snap instantly back into his mind. One of them must have found its mark.


	4. Just Synapses Firing

i'm gonna get so repetitive but i'm gonna say it again anyway - thank you so much for giving this fic a chance and thank you for your enthusiasm about it! it keeps me going with the long haul of writing in front of me - it's going to be a long one that's for sure. (title, for those playing along at home, playlist wise, is bastille's 'power'.)

chapter warning: there is a focus on blood and injury in this chapter, though it's not extremely graphic or serious.

* * *

For another moment like the one when he'd first heard gunfire, Jack's heart stops. It stays still for longer this time, in the absence of clear and present danger, skin going cold and the air stilling around him. Mac has been shot. Jack's partner has been shot. The gravity of the situation, of exactly how badly Jack has failed, careens down into him swiftly and soundly, knocking the breath from his chest.

While he was outside, looking at trees and wearing ridiculous glasses, his partner was inside being _attacked,_ he's been _shot_ and now he's wounded and bleeding and Jack just… didn't notice. The entire time they'd been picking through that building, the entire ride in the car, standing here now waiting for exfil to arrive, his partner has been bleeding. And not once, that entire time, had Mac seen fit to tell him about it. It's hard to pin down exactly which part of that Jack finds more disturbing - the fact that his partner was shot and this had escaped his noticing for an extended period of time, or the fact that Mac had deliberately concealed being shot with such a degree of success after first _deciding_ to conceal this fact.

It occurs to Jack after a moment that he's just standing there dumbfounded and he really ought to be doing something, and that kick-starts him into motion.

"You're bleeding." It's a flat statement, and Mac glances down, his hand covering the stain automatically.

"Whatever," he mutters, and Jack can't believe what he's hearing.

"Not whatever, you're _shot,_ get over here." He reaches as he speaks, taking a step towards the kid with his hand out. Seeing the approach, the hand moving to pull the side of the jacket away and expose the wound, Mac reacts sharply. It's like some kind of invisible concussive blow has forced him away from the gesture. His body curves in on itself, turning away from Jack's hand, taking one long step back.

Jack has seen that kind of behavior before, the kind of look on the kid's face now. That wide-eyed, frightened, defensive, angry look. He's seen it on cornered animals, on people in situations where they feel backed into a wall and threatened. Anger pulses up in Jack's chest, replaced quickly with worried fear, swapping out with anger again, and around and around. It's impossible to sort through, this muddle of feelings, and so he just backs off, before he makes the situation worse. He wants to demand Mac to show him the wound, and he wants to yell at him for not calling for help before it could've been dealt, and none of that would do anything but make things worse, so Jack backs off and turns away.

_Okay, Dalton,_ he tells himself sternly. _Okay. Assess the situation._ First and most important question - how badly is Mac hurt. Clearly, if he's still conscious and coherent and upright, the injury, factually speaking, cannot be that bad. He can't be losing too much blood, or he'd look a lot worse than he does, and Jack would've seen it before now. Most likely, it's just a graze, the bullet just close enough to carve a small, shallow trench in Mac's side.

Having now established with a fair degree of certainty that Mac is unlikely to drop dead before the helicopter arrives to pick them up, Jack refocuses. He takes a deep breath, counts to three, then to eight for good measure, and looks back at Mac. The kid's still standing there with his side turned defensively towards the car, face hostile and guarded. It doesn't look like he's moved at all since Jack reached for him, and he doesn't unfurl or relax his tensed body until several more moments pass in stillness, the only sound the ambient noise of the meadow around them.

"How bad is it, exactly?" Jack's question is measured and deliberate, even and calm, and Mac keeps looking at him wordlessly for a few more moments before moving.

His hand, flecked with neon green spray paint and smeared red, pulls back his jacket so Jack can see for himself. There's a long, thin rip in Mac's button up shirt, over his ribs, the surrounding material moderately soaked and stained red. Blood has seeped down into the waistband of his pants, creeping slowly down his thigh, but it hasn't reached his knee, and Mac's coloring is mostly good. A little pale, a bruise forming faint and high on one cheek, but overall, he looks mostly okay.

Mostly.

As mostly okay as a person who's been shot _can_ look.

"See? Not bad," Mac says, only barely this side of a snap. He's once more taken up with his refusal to look Jack in the face, instead staring off at a distant mountain ridge. He lets the jacket fall back into place but doesn't cinch it around his torso this time.

No point in hiding it, Jack supposes. The jig is up.

Really, it should've been up long before this. Before they even left the building, he should've known about what happened. If he'd been doing his job right - his job that, as Matty has so intently reminded him, was at least eighty percent keeping Mac alive and in one piece to do _his_ job - then the first thing he would've done is assess the damage. He'd heard _gunshots_ for crying out loud, why he hadn't even _asked_ if maybe Mac had gotten hit, trusting instead that he would self-report any trouble, which is _never_ a safe bet with field agents, he's learned that the hard way, is beyond him-

The train of thought ferociously berating Jack for falling down on the job abruptly screeches to a halt when he realizes something. Why _hadn't_ he asked if Mac was hit? He did. Maybe not in those exact words, but he had definitely stopped, before they'd so much as left the interior office. Sure, it was a little belated, but he hadn't even let five minutes go by without requesting a status report on whether or not Mac had been injured in the firefight. Fire-statuette fight. Whatever.

And when he'd asked, Mac had answered. 'I'm fine.' He'd stood there, bleeding from a gunshot wound he couldn't possibly have evaluated yet for severity, and said to Jack's face that he was _fine_. He'd lied.

"You lied to me." The accusation is out before Jack can stop it. And, really, why should he stop it? It's the truth, and now that he's been assured that Mac isn't about to keel over at any moment, anger is back to the dominant feeling in him, overtaking concern and even confusion by miles.

"Excuse me?" Affronted is nowhere near strong enough a word to describe the expression that's overtaken Mac's face. "I did not _lie_ to you."

Amazing, how he keeps digging himself deeper into Jack's bad graces. Usually, being shot would be enough to save any partner of his from the doghouse, but with Mac seemingly unwilling to so much as acknowledge what happened, it's not working this time.

"Bullshit! I asked, back at Halilovic's base, I _asked you_ if you were okay. And you _lied_ straight to my face. You were in an altercation with a man who _shot you_ – and don't even get me _started_ on the fact that you did not so much as _touch your weapon_ to fire back – and not only do you not notify me immediately of the hostile threat, you lied when I asked if you were alright. When I directly ask you for information about the status of your _health_ you need to answer the question, and tell the _truth_ when you do."

"I said I was fine, yeah," Mac retorts, his own hackles up at the direction this conversation is taking. "Because I was _fine_. I'd been _grazed_ but I was still mission-capable and so when you asked me if I was alright, I saw no reason I couldn't still fulfill expectations of me on this operation. I was injured, sure, but I was _fine_. I _am_ fine. You had exactly as much information as you needed, I could keep pulling my damn weight."

Before Jack can have the opportunity to illustrate exactly how 'mission-capable' and 'fine' are in no way the same thing, and when he was asking, he had been asking about Mac's wellbeing rather than his ability to continue 'pulling his own damn weight', he's interrupted. The distant _whup-whup-whup_ of helicopter blades comes over the horizon, and grows closer by the moment. Exfil team Echo Romeo is here to retrieve them, to spirit them out of Croatia and back home to California.

Making a snap decision, given they are barely six weeks into this partnership, and this will be his first meeting with Echo Romeo, Jack points at Mac.

"This conversation," he says, hoping his tone accurately conveys how much he is very much not at all joking, "is _not_ over."

Apparently having located his sense of self preservation, Mac doesn't roll his eyes, though the intent is palpable. He pulls his jacket fully closed and zips it, displaying no intention of allowing any of the exfil agents and their First Aid kits anywhere near the injury. Jack is out of the will to fight him on it for now, and doesn't take any initiative to point it out when Echo Romeo sets the bird down and they both climb up into it. If any member of the four-person team inside the small aircraft notices the blood on Mac's hands or his pants, they don't say anything about it.

Jack gives the stern-faced woman sitting across from him a tight smile and settles in for the tensest helicopter ride of his life – a strong statement, given his history. The trip, devoid of any kind of conversation, offers him the opportunity to mull over what's just happened. Some of the frustrated angry feeling in his chest is fading. It's not gone by any means, but it is retreated to the background enough for other things to start creeping forward. There's a sick feeling in his gut that nags at him, vague and unsettled, and the more he thinks about it, the more oddly he feels about the events following the arrival of Halilovic's footsoldiers. At the very least, there seems to have been some kind of miscommunication with Mac about what exactly Jack's role here is, and how it's going to work with his own.

It's with this unsettled, slightly nauseated feeling still bothering him that Jack disembarks the helicopter, and it persists on the flight home on the plane waiting for them at the nearest airstrip. It's still there when they land in Los Angeles as well, when they're back in the main building, just the two of them in a long, empty hallway.

When they arrive back home, it's late enough that the day-to-day operations of DXS have ceased, non-essential personnel returning home. There are a few people around still; there always are, night security patrolling or restless agents in the gym, on-call exfil asleep in their wing or technical analysts assisting an operation on the other side of the world from their computers. For the most part, however, the place is deserted, offering Jack the opportunity to speak to Mac with a moderate expectation of privacy. Of course, there's another edge to that sword as well, and it means there's nothing else around to distract from the argument they'd been having in Croatia, still hanging half-finished in the air between them.

Priorities, though.

"You should go to medical," Jack says, eventually, breaking the awkward, thick silence. "Get that checked out. Stitches, if you need 'em."

Of course, he should've probably predicted how that recommendation was going to land.

"I'm not going to medical."

Matty really did get him this job and this specific assignment with the sole and focused purpose of driving him completely out of his mind. This kid had to be in on it, this nepotism hire with the surfer-boy haircut and gadget-y pocket knife, participating in the world's most elaborate prank and laughing with Matty about it on the weekends.

"Why," Jack grinds out, closing his eyes tightly as he says it, "for the love of God, are you not going to medical, Mac?"

When he opens his eyes again, he sees the belligerence he'd been expecting, but something else too. The cornered look is back, the hunted-animal fear from when Jack had reached for him before.

"I go to medical, they make a report. They make a report, the Director sees it."

_My dad sees it_, Jack hears, unspoken under the title.

"Okay. And then… What? Help me understand here. Help me understand why you got shot and are now refusing to see the on-call doctor."

Jack is doing his best to be patient, to keep calm and approach this rationally. Something is clearly going on here, something more than just Mac's personal vendetta against Jack's patience, nerves, and sanity. Maybe he's, if the pun can be excused, gun-shy about stitches after whatever happened to his neck. It had obviously been serious, if the scarring left behind is any indication, and he would've spent more than a minute in the hospital for that one. Maybe he's going to get written up for not using his weapon to defend himself, or… something. There has to be something that will make this make sense.

"I just… It doesn't need to turn into some big _thing_. I can deal with it myself. I know enough to know what needs stitches and what doesn't, and this doesn't. I can handle it myself, and it stays between us. Medical doesn't have to deal with it, nobody needs to make a report about it. Okay?"

There's defiance in the question, but nervousness too, as if Mac knows that if Jack decided to radio down to medical right now, there was really nothing he could do to stop it – and, more to the point, Jack's own after-action report could give him away too, should he make an entirely truthful one. Weighing his options, his anger and frustration and the nagging feeling that something isn't what it seems here, the tenuous peace that's forming between the two of them, Jack makes a decision.

"Okay. But I'm making sure it's not bad enough to make stitches."

Mac makes an odd face at him, like that was somehow farther than the last thing he'd been expecting, and nods once, repeating back, "Okay."

'I'll deal with it myself' turns out to mean 'I'll raid the supply closet where the exfil teams stock their go-kits out of'. Mac gains access to exfil's wing of the building with a keycard that he sheepishly explains to Jack he'd cloned off a friend on an exfil team, a woman for whom he'd once fixed a malfunctioning break room coffee pot that maintenance wouldn't replace.

Jack leans against one of the racks containing hermetically sealed suture kits and more gauze than you can shake a stick at and watches Mac with barely disguised curiosity. Mac goes straight to a specific shelf and pulls a stepladder over to it, sitting down on the second-lowest rung so he doesn't have to balance against one of the shelves while undoing his shirt. Once it's opened, it's clear that his assessment had been accurate. It's not the shallowest of cuts but it isn't gaping either, and while it has to be causing him a world of hurt, it won't need stitches. Mac fumbles around on a shelf behind him for what turns out to be a bottle of peroxide solution. He then looks up and waves a hand at Jack and the shelving behind him, who hands him a packet of gauze when he figures out what's being requested of him.

Mac tears the packaging open with his teeth, wetting the produced gauze pad with peroxide and pressing it over the bullet graze extending a good six inches over his ribcage. With horrified fascination, Jack notes that while his face blanches and his jaw clenches, Mac doesn't hesitate or flinch. He's certainly dedicated to maintaining his reputation and ego in front of his father, if this is the lengths to which he'll go to avoid admitting being wounded on a mission.

Once it's been sufficiently cleaned and sterilized, Mac looks to the shelf he'd originally walked directly to, fumbling around until he comes up with what turns out to be a roll of steri-strips. He applies them with careful, steady fingers, closing the injury quickly and efficiently. Finally, he waves for more gauze from Jack, who passes him one of the larger squares, which is then taped over his side. The only hint left that Mac was shot that day is the blood still staining his clothes. Even the marks on his hands are gone, alcohol wipes unfolded to clean his palms of the evidence of the field medicine he's just performed on himself inside a walk-in closet.

Throughout the whole bizarre ordeal, not a word is exchanged between them. Once it's over, Mac buttons his shirt back up, heedless of the blood staining it and the rip in the side, and holds his arms out, a challenge to Jack.

"Satisfied?" he asks, irritated exasperation steeped into the single word.

"I guess," Jack fires back, matching tone for tone. Before Mac can get up, though, he speaks again, modulating his voice down to one less likely to instigate a further argument. "Before you go though, we gotta talk about that. That _cannot_ happen."

"I didn't let it interfere with the goal," Mac protests instantly, looking offended. "I did my job. Everything turned out fine."

"Yeah, sure," says Jack, moving quickly past that utterly irrelevant point, "what I mean is you cannot get _shot_ and then _not tell me._ You can't get in a fight outnumbered four to one and _not tell me_. Hell, you can't be seeing hostiles approaching and decide you're just _not going to tell me._ Do you understand what I'm saying?"

The Director's voice flashes into Jack's mind, his summary of duties.

"_Make sure he doesn't get himself killed or tank the mission because he doesn't notice some glaring threat."_

It's followed immediately by Matty's voice, the reminder that's been dogging him ever since he saw the blood on Mac's shirt.

"_Your job is to keep him safe. Your job is to keep that boy alive."_

It's contrasted with Mac's voice now, contrasting that very order.

"I don't understand what you're so worked up about, our mission was a success!" The fact that he's making this claim with a bloodied shirt and the packaging from the gauze taped to his body to keep the rest of that blood inside it, is so absolutely ludicrous that Jack nearly can't help himself, barely restraining an incredulous laugh.

"No!" Jack's voice is higher both in pitch and volume than he planned on letting it be, but he doesn't stop to reign it in before continuing. "_Your_ mission was a success, but _mine_ wasn't. Because you got _shot."_

"I was grazed. _Barely_," Mac tacks on, and Jack really, truly, genuinely does not want to know if he made that clarification because he actually believes it isn't that serious or because Mac was just trying to get a rise out of him.

"And if that man had just _barely_ had better aim, we may not have gotten you to exfil in time. You almost died, Mac."

"And?"

"And nothing! You could've been killed on my watch!"

Something in Mac's face shutters and hardens and he snaps back, echoing Jack's words to him, "Well I'm _sorry_ if my almost being _killed on your watch_ interfered with your job."

That just about strikes Jack dumb, and he asks before he can stop himself, "My job?"

"Watching over the mission, you know, making sure nothing passes by when I get too focused to pay attention. Making sure nothing I miss screws up the goal."

The way Mac is talking, it's like he doesn't know what Jack's job actually is, and it leaves Jack speechless, unsure how to clarify things.

"No, Mac, it's you. _You_ are my job. Watching out for you."

"I know," Mac says, face bewildered like only one of them is talking sense and it isn't Jack. "You watch for what I miss, patch the holes I leave in the mission."

"That's not what I meant at _all._ You're really not getting this, are you?" asks Jack. His chest feels tight and anger is fading into something else, something worried and more than a little sick, like on the helicopter back but worse. Something is not right here. Mac isn't getting it at _all,_ and Jack doesn't know how to explain it to him.

It's almost funny. Jack has been on the other side of this conversation before. Not that long ago, actually. Except, when it had been Matty, trying to impress on him how important it was that the focus, the primary and if necessary _only_ focus of his job was to keep Mac alive, Jack had already been on the same page, and didn't need to hear it.

Matty had caught him, before they left on their second mission, the one whose subject Jack can barely recall for its banality. She'd stopped him in the hall as he was jogging to catch up with Mac, who was already halfway out the building. He'd been irritated at the time, not wanting to disrupt the tenuous, stony peace that existed between him and his partner, but she'd seemed serious. Her gaze was focused hard and he quickly quelled any protest, choking it back down his throat.

"Your job," she'd said, "is to keep him safe."

"Yeah," Jack agreed, the word drawing out into two syllables in his confusion. "I know, Matty."

"_Listen_ to me." Matty's hand grabbed onto his wrist, her fingers tight and insistent. "His focus is the mission, your focus is him. Do you hear me? Your job is to keep that boy alive."

"I _know,"_ he repeated, and tried to smile at her in a way that was reassuring. Maybe she thought it was their first mission in the field together, or thought Mac was so distracted and tunnel visioned on jobs that he was in constant danger. Either way, it was more annoying and insulting when she'd said it than anything else. But now, after all of… _that_, it sticks in his mind like one of the burr seeds the dog would bring in after spending the afternoon running in the field.

Matty hadn't been worried about Jack not understanding the function of his job. She'd already known that _Mac_ didn't.

"Okay," Jack says, eyes roaming around, as if searching for a better way to explain this, a way that will make what he's trying to say finally make it through Mac's skull. "Let me put it this way. Every time we get to the end of a mission," his hands are cupped in front of him, indicating a point on an invisible line, then gesturing swiftly back towards the beginning of this hypothetical segment of space, "and there is _less blood in your body_ than there was when we started, then I have failed, alright? My job is to make sure that the condition you leave this building in is the same as when you arrived. So just. Next time, you tell me immediately and you let me handle it. Understand?"

The look on Mac's face says 'no, I don't understand, and I don't even understand why we're having this conversation', but at least he doesn't say as much. Despite the bewildered expression, he nods, and says shortly, "Yeah. I get it."

_No, you don't,_ Jack thinks as he watches Mac turn away. _But I'm gonna keep at it until you do. _


	5. Say It Out Loud (It Can't Be Undone)

please just imagine me sending cosmic waves of love and appreciation out to you in the universe. thank you so much. i love writing this fic and your positivity and reception of it makes me love working on it that much more.

(chapter title from half alive's "the fall".)

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In the month since the mission in Croatia, the one where Mac was shot, life at DXS settles into a kind of routine. Jack keeps a close eye on him on missions, careful and watchful, and he starts thinking of it as a tally system of sorts. Every time he blocks a shot or takes out a threat before Mac has to worry about it, he counts it as a point in his favor, a pebble on the scale, weighing it down towards trust. Jack isn't used to this, to having to win the faith of the partner he's been assigned to protect, but those EOD techs, the geniuses with the magic hands, they'd all understood his role from the start. Mac is different, though, and without that foundation, the solid understanding of what he was here to do, and his dedication to doing it, it's a foundation he's having to build, piece by piece.

The day that Mac calls out over the radio, calls Jack in because there's a man approaching the hideout where he's rewiring a panel to cut communications between a warlord and his generals, is one he remembers proudly. He swoops in and takes care of the problem swiftly and soundly, and the look on Mac's face when he looks up is one that struck him to the core. There had been surprise there, enough to be notable, and something else too. Something thoughtful, and serious. They'd exchanged a wordless nod, and that was that.

After that day, Mac does it again. And Jack feels the scales as they tip. It's hard work, and it's slow, and it's frustrating more days than it isn't, but it's working.

Those first few missions, the errands and package runs, they were as Jack expected. Training wheels. After that, things get harder, more complicated, more dangerous, and Jack takes it in stride. He feels himself coming alive under it, the work, and he can see more and more clearly why Matty brought him into this.

The further out they venture and the longer they're gone for, the more paradoxically Jack finds himself rooted in Los Angeles. He gets a lease at an actual apartment, one he likes, and starts buying furniture, redecorating. Goes out into his new neighborhood, finds the hole in the wall restaurants only the locals know about. Introduces himself to the single mother on the floor above his, the trio of grad students who live on the floor below. And all the while he begins to settle into his life outside DXS, it strikes him as more and more strange that, every time he walks back into the building, Mac is there.

It isn't just for missions, or specific assignments the two of them are on together, or some side project the Director has him on alone. He's there late at night and early in the morning, when Jack is in taking care of the paperwork he's taken over for their little team. It seems like Mac is always somewhere, a glimpse of him caught here and there, as the doors are closing to the elevator down to R&D, walking past outside a window and gone by the time Jack realizes he'd been there. It's so frequent that Jack begins to wonder if he ever goes home, if he's here all hours because there's nothing else for him to be doing.

As frustrating and prickly as he is, Jack can't help but feel like he's becoming attached to the kid he's been assigned to protect. It makes him worry, the way Mac seems to be completely absorbed in work every time Jack sees him, and then annoyed at himself for being worried, and then hypocritical for judging Mac for the same kind of behavior he himself is engaged in. It stands to reason he wouldn't see Mac at DXS all the time if he wasn't at DXS all the time, but then, he's new to town. Mac is young. He's twenty-three, he should be out there with his friends, going to parties and enjoying his life. He shouldn't be doing this kind of job, and even allowing for him being the kind of prodigious wunderkind he's swiftly proving himself to be, he shouldn't be so wrapped up in it that he's never doing anything else.

Jack is well aware he sounds like a grumpy old man waving a cane around and demanding these younguns get off his lawn and get a life. But it's worrying, nevertheless. He tries to put it out of his mind, not to get too involved in his young partner's personal life. What Mac does with his time is his business, Jack supposes, and if he wants to spend all of it here, so be it.

Another development in the month following Croatia is that Jack starts to see Matty around DXS as well. The early-transition nightmare is dying down, the dust left behind by her explosive introduction to the Deputy Director position settling and allowing her to form some kind of a routine too. She runs the prep for a few of their missions, and Jack has to admit, he enjoys getting to work with her again. She's efficient and to the point without losing her knack for pointed moments of humor, even in tense situations. Jack remembers quickly why she was one of the best people he's ever worked alongside, and it's not just for her work ethic.

It's late in the afternoon, just after the completion of their fifth mission, a successful, if freezing, operation in a remote location in Siberian Russia, and Jack is on a walk outside DXS. After the harsh climate he'd just spent four days in, which was four days too many if he's being completely honest, the warmth of the Los Angeles sun is a welcome reprieve. He'd missed the weather - it's nice to not feel like he's about to freeze to death even with three layers of coats on - and he's going to enjoy as much of it as he can before he goes in to write his after-action. He's got an orange in his hands that he'd picked up from a roadside produce stand on his way in that day, and the smell of it cuts through the air, sharp and sweet.

Mac was there when he arrived and Jack is sure he's still there now, somewhere in that building, doing god-knows-what. Jack tries to put it out of his mind just at the moment, worry about it later. Right now he wants to enjoy the sun on his face.

"Dalton."

The raised voice calling his name catches his attention and he looks back towards the building. It's Matty, having just emerged from one of the side doors, the one nearest the hall of directors, as he's taken to referring to where the heads of department offices are located. He squints at her, trying to make out her expression from more than a dozen feet away. She doesn't look very pleased, certainly doesn't look like she's enjoying the gorgeous day the way he is, which is a damn shame if you ask Jack - it is really a gorgeous day. When she waves, indicating him over, the movement impatient and furtive, like she's worried about being seen, Jack's own enjoyment of the day begins to fade.

As he crosses the pavement walkway separating them, the one winding all the way around the building, Jack tries to go slowly. He wants to enjoy at least these last moments of his sunny, late Los Angeles afternoon with this nice breeze and this nice orange before whatever Matty's about to tell him surely ruins it entirely. Jack puts the last section of the orange into his mouth as he reaches her, and tries to ignore how it suddenly tastes bitter.

"Everything okay?" he asks her when the orange is gone, peel tossed away in the grass next to the sidewalk.

"Do you have a minute to speak to me in my office? There's something I want to talk with you about." Matty's voice is tight and too casual in a way that makes Jack instantly nervous.

"Sure," he agrees, and without another word she turns and goes back inside. Jack follows shortly after.

Compared to the bright sun hanging low in the sky, the lighting inside DXS is weak and gloomy. Jack blinks in the sudden dim, waiting for his eyes to adjust, already missing the natural light, among other aspects of what his life was like five minutes ago, before whatever is about to happen got started. Matty's office is pretty far down the hall, several doors away from Director MacGyver's. Jack is grateful at least that the man isn't around to run into and won't be extremely nearby - he's not had direct issues with his boss so far, but something about the man is off-putting.

"How are you settling in?" Matty asks when they're both seated, she at her desk and Jack in one of the chairs across it, facing her.

"I'm settling in fine," he says, and it's the truth. "Apartment's nice. Neighbors are nice. Sun's nice, especially after, y'know. Siberia."

"I'm sure. And your partner? How are you getting on with him?"

"Well," sighs Jack, eyes roaming up over the bland beige ceiling of Matty's office and wondering how to describe the constant surprise of a living headache that is Angus MacGyver, "the kid is on my last nerve, swear to God it's like he's bound and determined to turn all my hair grey and put me in an early grave, but y'know. Other than that." He looks back to her, notes her unimpressed expression, and nods. "You were right, though. He's nothing I've ever seen before, he's incredible. He's driving me _nuts_ but he's incredible."

"That sounds about right," Matty agrees, with a hint of a smile. It doesn't last long though, and soon her face is back to the mask of seriousness that it's been since he saw her outside.

"Alright, Matty." Squaring his shoulders, Jack straightens up in his chair and looks straight at her, eye contact a steady challenge. "I know you didn't call me in here just to chat about my partner. If it was that, you could've caught me in the hall any time, but here I am, in your office, and I'm getting the same sort of feeling from this conversation that I got in the park, day you offered me this job. What is this about?"

If anything, the feeling Jack has today is stronger and worse than the one he'd had at that table with Matty those weeks ago, when he'd unknowingly driven right into a new chapter in his life. He had no idea what he was walking into that day, and with how strange that turned out to be, he can't imagine what is about to happen now. It can't get much stranger - but then again, Jack is learning that you can't take such things for granted in life, especially not this life.

"Your recent mission," Matty says, getting right to the point, now that she's been called out on her preamble obfuscating her main point, and not well. "Siberia."

"Stolen nuclear waste, not enough for any kind of huge damage, but enough for a small weapons test, maybe enough for a prototype. A trial run, maybe, for something bigger. We got in, got it, got out." The cliff's notes are easy enough, but it had been a lot harder than that, and had almost been harder still. "It went fine." Jack cringes, and amends the statement. "For the most part, anyway."

"Define for the most part."

Jack's head tips to the side and he considers how to put it. "I mean it could've been worse, but I caught the issue before anybody got hurt or anything like that. Exfil had the wrong location, when I got back to where the sat-phone could catch a signal, I learned they were twenty miles off the mark. Lucky thing we hadn't dumped the truck yet, or we'd have had to hike it on foot, may have missed the extraction window entirely."

Matty nods, looking thoughtful, but not surprised. Jack's eyes narrow and he leans forward, elbow braced on the arm of his chair.

"What is going on here?" he asks directly. "Something _is_ clearly going on. You're acting weird - my _partner's_ been acting weird since the minute I met him. This whole place is weird, something is up, and you really ought to tell me what it is now so we can cut the nonsense and get to the point rather than asking me all of these roundabout questions about my mission when you could've just read the after action when I wrote it."

Just like that day in the park, she admits it without any amount of runaround or protest.

"You're right," Matty says. "There is something going on here, and to be completely honest, I had motives beyond what I told you when I brought you that job offer, when I brought you on here. It wasn't just about a job opening and keeping you occupied, and Agent MacGyver needing a partner who could keep up."

"Then what was it about?" Jack is growing swiftly impatient with this conversation. He feels like he's become an unwitting pawn in a chess game being played far above his head, and it's not the kind of feeling he's ever been comfortable with. Someone better start reading him in on the moves, and now. "I can't help unless I know what's going on, and you've gotta want my help, or it wouldn't've been me you brought on, you're smarter than that."

"I am," confirms Matty, and it would be arrogance coming from just about anyone else. From her, it's just the honest truth. "And I do. I want your help figuring out what exactly it is that's going on here. Because something is happening at DXS, and it's something that should not be. You said exfil would've been sent to the wrong location if you hadn't double checked and rerouted them."

"Right," says Jack, the word slow and drawn out. He can't see yet where she's going with this and he feels uneasy.

"Just before you departed for Siberia, I made a few checks on your mission intel. It turns out you'd been given incorrect numbers - the amount of nuclear material reported to be retrieved was off. The original reported numbers were lower - much lower. Enough lower to be insufficient for the creation of a weapon. You would've been expecting to walk into something far, far less serious than you did if I hadn't verified the report against our initial intel. And that exfil team. Sierra November."

"Good folks. Efficient. Solid Russian from uh, the, from-"

"Meredith Casey," Matty fills in, providing the name of the woman who'd gotten them through a potentially sticky situation with an air traffic controller. "She's why I sent them. There was another team slated to go for pickup, Echo Quebec, who you'd met before, which is likely why they were scheduled, but not a single member of their team speaks a word of Russian. If you'd been caught in any kind of position where they had to communicate with anyone but the two of you, we'd have had to scramble to find someone from the lab on comms to translate on the spot. Meredith Casey, with Sierra, she's fluent. So I rescheduled the teams."

"Echo Quebec. The pickup site. The intel numbers. That's a lot of 'could've gone wrongs' and 'would've been bad's for one mission."

"Exactly. I was waiting to see if it was a fluke, or a one-off, but this keeps happening." Matty leans down and opens a locked drawer in her desk, pulling out a stack of folders, print outs paper-clipped to the insides. "Seven mission after actions and intel reports where I was able to identify errors that could have led to major issues with the mission, if not serious injury or death, all of them involving Agent Angus MacGyver. Something is wrong here, and whatever it is, your partner is at the center of it. Now don't get me wrong, I don't believe he's responsible. If anything, he's the reason they haven't been catastrophic."

It's a timely clarification, as the moment she'd said that whatever was going on had Mac at the center of it, Jack felt his hackles go up, the beginning of a protest rise in his throat. He didn't know the kid very well - didn't think the kid _wanted_ to be known, really - but some instinct in him, maybe loyalty to a partner, maybe intuition, had told him that if something bad was happening, Mac wasn't involved. Couldn't be involved. It was a relief to know Matty didn't think so either.

"Have you spoken to the Director about any of this? What's his take?" Jack asks, swallowing down embarrassment at how quickly he'd been about to snap at Matty in defense of a kid he was just on the verge of friendly with.

"He doesn't know."

"He doesn't?" That was a surprise. Matty isn't the type for insubordination, and if she's gone so far as to be compiling files, she should've been in communication with the Director about this by now. "Why not?"

"When he found out about the person who had infiltrated DXS," Matty explains, absently smoothing the edge of a paper sticking out from one of the folders, "the ensuing purge of the Department caused such a disruption that things have only barely settled back down. I don't know how he would react to the suggestion that maybe, in that purge, he didn't get everyone. I don't know how many people would survive a second. If I would, given what happened to my predecessor. So for the moment, this is staying off the Director's radar."

It tells Jack a lot about Matty's opinion of their boss, whether or not she'd meant it to. Jack isn't entirely sure he likes what it's telling him, either. The kind of boss you can't clue into an internal investigation, for fear he may overreact and fire anyone in his path, is not the kind of boss Jack particularly enjoys working for.

The pile of folders is given a short push across Matty's desk, ending up closer to Jack than to Matty.

"I know I've already asked a lot of you. I know this is asking a lot more. But I need somebody I can trust to keep this between us, and somebody close enough to it all to help me sort out what's going on here. I'm not going to order you. But I am asking you. Will you help?"

Jack has known Matty for years. He trusts her, and he owes her, and despite any time, distance, and trouble that's passed between them, she's always been high on the short list of people for whom Jack would drop everyone and come to help if she asked him to. And if that weren't enough, there's the thought of Mac's face, the confusion in him when Jack acted to protect him on missions, the tenuous connection building between them, the first time his partner radioed him for help. Without a moment's hesitation, Jack nods.

"Of course I will. I promise, this stays between us. Whatever it is, we'll figure it out."

Matty nods, satisfaction and just a hint of smug assuredness in her face, like it was confirmation of an answer she'd already known was coming. It's a reaction that makes Jack feel proud and sure it was the right answer. She'd already known he would agree, but had done him the courtesy of asking anyway, acknowledging what she was asking of him.

When he leaves the building, the sun has lost its friendliness, and feels more like a spotlight, leaving him nowhere to hide. The light of the fading day is inescapable and illuminating, and it's everything he can do not to hide the evidence from eyes that may be watching. If he moved to shove it under his jacket, though, it would only look that much more suspicious. For now, he looks like any other agent, taking paperwork home rather than finishing it at the office. The folders feel heavy in Jack's hands. With every step he takes, they feel heavier. By the time he gets to his car and deposits them in the passenger's seat, they feel less like folders of paper and more like bricks.


	6. Patience (That Of Saints)

[heart eyes emoji x10, crying emoji x10, sparkly emoji x10]

thank you so much, for the theories and the feelings and the encouragement and the yelling in the comments, it makes this really fun, i'm so stoked to share this fic with you guys and i'm so happy you're having as good a time as i am with it.

(playlist has reached 'from the ground up' by sleeping at last)

* * *

They're gone for ten days this time, and it's the longest Jack and Mac have been out of the country on a mission together. It's an exhausting one too, especially for Mac, who finishes out the mission on ten hours of sleep in the last four days, and somehow he doesn't sleep on the plane home either. Jack watches him across the aisle, no small amount bothered by the fact that, despite his evident exhaustion, he won't so much as close his eyes and let his head fall back against the seat. Throughout the flight, Mac is alert and focused, though with nothing in particular to focus on, and Jack can see out of the corner of his eye that the kid's hands are trembling, fidgeting with a Swiss Army Knife he's pulled out of his jacket a couple of times.

They get back to Los Angeles in the middle of the day but may as well have been two or three o'clock in the morning for all that Jack feels exhausted and ready to sleep for a minimum of ten hours - and he's the one who _did_ manage to catch some z's on the plane.

He stops in the hall of directors to speak to Matty for a moment before he heads home for the day, give her a pre-empted copy of the after action cliff's notes, so she can add it to her folder of data to analyze later. Then it's off home and… Except, the moment he steps out into the lobby, he sees something that stops him short. He sees his partner, sitting on a bench near the front lobby. Mac is slumped back against the wall, hands hanging limply at his sides, staring with blank non-focus at the wall across from him. Near as Jack can tell, he'd been headed out to leave, and felt the gruelling nature of their mission catch up to him, along with the absolute lack of sleep he'd gotten the whole time. Probably hadn't felt well enough to drive, and sat down for a moment, only to stay there and not get up.

Closing his eyes and telling himself he's really getting way too attached way too quickly, and Mac isn't a puppy he can take home from the pound, Jack sighs and walks over to him.

"Come on, kid," Jack says quietly, sitting down on the edge of the bench next to Mac but leaving a good two feet of space separating them. Don't want to spook him when his nerves are already fried from the hard work and bone-deep exhaustion. "Come get in the car, I'll drive you home."

Mac's head turns to look at him, slowly, and he looks surprised to see Jack there, but doesn't have the energy to flinch or so much as blink hard. "Hm?" the hum is distracted and distant, sluggish like his movement had been.

"I'm taking you home," Jack reiterates. The brief interaction is doing nothing to dissuade the concern that had been growing in him the whole mission. He did his best to keep Mac safe in the field, but didn't quite feel he had the ground to stand on from which he could bug Mac about his personal habits, about how much sleep he was getting or care he was taking of himself. "Grab your bag, we can get going now, if you're ready."

"No," Mac mumbles, shaking his head. He reaches up and scrubs at his face, head still wobbling slowly from side to side. "It's fine. I'm fine, I was just…" The sentence meanders off into silence and he looks around the hall like he can't quite figure out for himself what he was 'just', never mind tell Jack what that was.

Of course, just like everything else with this kid, this is going to be an ordeal. Oh well, though. Never let it be said Jack Dalton is a quitter. Once he's committed, he's committed.

"You were just about to pass out right here in the hall, is what you were just about to do," he says with a snort. "Come on. I'll pull the car around so you don't have to walk all the way across the parking lot, and then we'll get you dropped off at home safe and sound. It'll make me feel better to make sure you're not passed out on the side of the highway or something."

Mac looks at him with narrowed eyes, and Jack can't quite tell if they're narrowed due to suspicion, or tiredness, or some combination of the two.

"Not a trick question, I promise. I'm not trying to dupe you or anything, whatever you're trying to work out in your overheated harddrive of a brain, alright?" Jack gives it a few seconds to sink in. "C'mon. My job doesn't stop at that door, just. Let me drive you home. For my own peace of mind, if not for you."

After a long pause, long enough that Jack stops worrying he's going to flatly refuse and starts worrying the kid's fallen asleep with his eyes open, Mac nods.

"Okay," he mutters, the word barely audible. He looks confused, and so beat he may lose consciousness at any moment, but at least he's being agreeable now.

"Okay," Jack repeats, clapping his palms to his thighs and standing up brusquely. "Come on out to the door in a minute or so, I'll pull the car around. If I don't see you there when I get there, I'll assume you've passed out on the bench and come in to grab you, got it?"

He's rewarded with a deeply puzzled hint of a smile, and another nod.

Jack leaves the building, shaking his hands as he goes to try and rouse himself back to full alertness. Though he'd gotten more rest than Mac had, he's still half-dead himself, and can't wait to get back to his own bed for a well-earned rest. As he walks out to his car, keys jingling brightly in his hand, Jack thinks on what he's about to do. This is going to be the first time he's ever seen where Mac lives, and he's got to admit, he's deeply curious.

The absent thoughts about Mac's life outside of DXS, the life he barely breathed a word of, have been drifting through Jack's mind more and more often since Siberia, and since his discussion in Matty's office in particular. He gets in the car and starts it up, and wonders what he's going to be dropping Mac off to, if it's going to be an apartment in the city, or a duplex on the outskirts. Maybe he lives with James still, and this is going to be the world's most awkward way to run into your boss outside of work hours. Or maybe he lives alone, and Jack is about to drop him off to some empty, echoing home where he'll be alone with his exhaustion and his fried nerves. Either way, Jack figures he'll know soon enough.

Luckily, Mac seems to have enough of his faculties about him that he manages to make outside in one piece and before Jack has to go back in and get him, which kicks the worry sitting like a lump in Jack's throat down a notch. He's also able to rattle an address off with only a few moment's deep thought, and Jack programs it into his GPS and sets the device into the cradle on the dash. He figures addresses may be one thing but expecting Mac to be able to give actual directions right now might be a bit much. They're driving through Los Angeles, Mac's head against the window and his eyes still resolutely open and focused forward, the radio playing through the air of the car's interior, when Jack loses his battle with his self control and asks.

"So, anybody waiting for you at home?" He tries to be casual about it, to conceal his burning curiosity, but Mac seems out of his head enough to not pick up on the obvious fishing for information.

"Mhm." The answer is hummed and distant, but coherent.

"Oh?"

"Roommate." Mac clears his throat and sits up a little straighter, eyes looking a little more focused. "Bozer. 'S my best friend, I've known him... Known him forever."

"That's good," Jack says, and thinks, as a silent afterthought, _thank God_. Because it is a relief to hear that at least Mac has something to go home to, something outside the walls of DXS. That he isn't alone outside of his job and his father. Jack has given up at this point, as he's driving his young partner home and worrying about his living circumstances, on wondering when he started getting this attached, and just accepted that Mac is as much a part of his life as any partner before him had been.

He pulls up outside a house that is not at all what he'd been expecting. In his consideration of where Mac lived, this quiet, sun-drunk street hadn't made the cut at all. It's a beautiful area, really, with a nice house at the bottom of a gently sloped driveway waiting at the address Mac had given him. As he pulls into it, stopping near the end, he sees the front door swing open, and a young man approximately Mac's age step out. He looks confused and suspicious, until Mac swings the passenger's door open and steps out, at which point the look on his face turns to relief and joy.

"Mac!" the young man, Bozer, Jack assumes, calls out, and Mac stumbles a little in his haste to get to the door, practically falling into his roommate's waiting hold. Mac is caught in a tight, relieved embrace, and Jack can see him returning it without hesitation, arms coming up to clutch at his friend, head ducked into his shoulder.

Jack stays there for a few more moments before he starts to feel weird just sitting in the driveway and watching, and puts his car in reverse to back out and head home. As the shift in the idling engine is registered, he sees Mac's roommate and old friend look up, and they make a brief few seconds of eye contact. Bozer lifts a hand from Mac's back, fingers twitching in a short wave of acknowledgement, possibly thanks, and Jack returns it. He pulls back out of the drive and watches out of the corner of his eye as the boys disappear back into the house, the door closing behind them and leaving the street to sit quiet and peaceful around them.

As he sets off towards his own home, ready to collapse and sleep like you do when it's well earned and much needed, something inside Jack's chest feels lighter, more at ease. Mac isn't alone. He wasn't leaving that kid alone to knock around an empty house, or to endlessly rehash details of a mission with his father. There had been someone waiting for him, someone who obviously cared, and to know that is a greater relief than Jack had been expecting.

* * *

"You look like you're about to pass out standing up."

Mac supposes he can forgive Bozer's observation its bluntness for the fact that his roommate is currently providing him the stability to ensure he gets inside the house without actually doing that. He and Bozer get inside without incident, and stop in the hall.

"Where to this time?"

It's the kind of question asked in the kind of way that you can only really pull off with any degree of clarity if you've known someone very well for a long time. Bozer's been around the block with him enough times to know that when he stumbles in after being gone for a week or more, on what he has been unforgivably deceived into believing are 'business trips' for the think tank he works for, he doesn't always want to go to his own room. Sometimes he prefers to collapse on the couch and sleep there, with the sounds of his roommate moving about his life around him to prove that it's over and he's home. Today is one of those days.

"Couch," he says, and Bozer turns toward the living room without further question or comment.

"I don't suppose you can tell me where you were this time." The words are dry and don't even pretend to be a question. But despite the sense that, like always, Bozer isn't enjoing the fact that Mac takes off to various corners of the world, 'consulting' with his think tank that focused primarily on international and cyber-security fields, and comes home exhausted and unable to breathe a word of what happened, his grip never falters, and he doesn't let go until they're both seated safely on the couch.

Mac cringes and shakes his head. He hates this part, the part where he has to lie to the person he's closest to in the world. He's already talked himself around in knots to give Bozer the most accurate information possible, explaining that yes, he works for a think tank, but the work they do there takes them all over the world, and sometimes into very dangerous situations. Dangerous enough that he needs to take a bodyguard with him on jobs, which is how he's explained his partners with DXS to Bozer as long as he's worked there. A few have been over for dinner, even, the ones that have lasted long enough.

"Figured as much," Bozer mutters, though the squeeze of his hand on Mac's shoulder says without words, _it's okay, I forgive you. I get it. _

He'd be less forgiving about what Mac said and half-said and didn't say if he knew the whole truth about how solidly he was being kept in the dark, but it has to be this way. James made it clear that secrecy was of utmost concern, even when it came to Bozer, someone he's known since Mac was in elementary school. It's probably one of the things, if not _the_ thing Mac hates the most about this job.

"You want anything to eat?" Bozer calls from where he's stood up and walked around the couch into the kitchen, rummaging around in the fridge.

"Nah," Mac answers, wondering if he sounds as listless and run-down as he feels. "'M okay. Thanks though." He lets his eyes drift shut and fumbles a hand around on the back of the couch for the blanket that's kept there. It's left purposefully for nights like this, where he doesn't feel like sleeping in his own room quite yet, needing the comforting sounds of life going on around him to prove that everything is fine and everyone is, for now at least, safe.

"How's it going with new guy?" comes the next question, floating across the kitchen island. "Saw he dropped you off today, which is good, cause you look like you'd probably have driven your car off the road if you'd tried to drive yourself. What kind of think-tank, even if it consults with foreign governments and whatever, doesn't let its employees sleep? Nah, don't answer that. Some scary dudes in SWAT gear would like, bust through the window and tackle you or whatever."

Mac's chest heaves in the worn echo of a laugh.

"For real though, how is it with him, is he a total loose canon like O'Reilly or dull as a… what did you call Haken?"

"Dull as a box of single-size socket wrenches," Mac finishes for him, slumping over into the couch and pulling the blanket with him. "He's fine, I guess."

"Fine, you guess," Bozer echoes at him, imitating his tone. "That's a top-rated review."

With a sigh, Mac wrinkles his face into a frown half hidden by the couch cushion. He still doesn't look up, doesn't so much as open his eyes, despite the fact that he can hear Bozer moving around, settling to sit on the coffee table just a few feet away.

"He's… I dunno. Got great recommendations, I guess. From like. Matty, and stuff." Mac is aware he sounds pretty bad, speaking in short, chopped up sentences in direct contrast to his usual vocabulary and speech patterns. If it was anybody here but Bozer he may be trying to cover it up, exactly how drained he is, but it's _Bozer_ and Bozer has seen him far worse off than this. There's no face left to save when it's just the two of them here, and it's freeing, in a way. "But he keeps… He's fussy."

"Fussy." There's something amused in Bozer's voice and Mac cracks one eye open wide enough to squint up at him and take in the raised eyebrow, the general sense of entertainment around Bozer's expression.

"Wouldn't let me drive home. _Hovers._ Won't let me do anything myself. _Fussy."_ It's hard to explain without getting into the details, and Mac doesn't have the mental power to come up with cover-appropriate equivalents of the anecdotes that will accurately explain Jack's behavior.

"Well," Bozer says, not able or not trying to keep the soft rebuke out of his voice, "as the person who's expecting him to come _home_ from work at the end of his trips to wherever it is he can't tell me about, consulting on who-knows-what kind of dangerous nonsense, I appreciate 'fussy' as a quality in my best friend's bodyguard, thanks. Anything else you don't like about him, or is it just that he won't let you crash your car on the side of the highway?"

"Very funny," Mac mutters. "I dunno. Feel like he doesn't trust me. Won't let me do anything myself. Thinks I'm just where 'm at because of my dad." He admits it with less reservation than he'd have had if he'd been fully conscious, what he was afraid he was being labeled as in Jack's head. If maybe his concern, all this emphasis on 'let me watch your back', 'let me take point on entry', 'let me drive you home' was all because he thinks Mac is some incompetent child riding on his daddy's coattails into a job he had no business being in.

"Well, you'll make him see the light soon enough, if he sticks around."

There's an unquestioning confidence in Bozer's voice that makes Mac's cheeks heat up, and he ducks his face further into the couch cushion.

"Whatever," he says, embarrassed. The normalcy of the conversation is seeping into Mac's shoulders, loosening the knotted muscles and easing the tension that's gripped him throughout the mission. Without the tension and adrenaline around to hold him up, he's losing his war with sleep quickly. His limbs feel heavy, pulled down into the couch, which is becoming the most comfortable surface he's ever laid on. He hears Bozer say something that he thinks is about Jack, maybe an instruction to invite his new partner over for dinner some time, and he hums in response, a wordless agreement to a suggestion he'd only partially heard.

A quiet chuckle follows it, and with the familiar sounds and scents of home around him, Mac only tenses a fraction when he feels a hand grasp the blanket covering him, pull it a little higher around his shoulders, then straighten it over his bent legs. Before he can register if Bozer says anything else, Mac loses his battle completely, and the day slips away into unconsciousness. The house remains warm and safe around him, and he sleeps without disturbance, through to the following morning.


	7. Trust is a Ribbon

i'm getting so repetitive. i love you guys. i love writing this fic. thank you for making it a process worth loving.

as a note, from here on out i wanna just stick a blanket warning on this fic for emotional/psychological abuse and the effects thereof, because well, james. specific chapter warnings will still appear when i, using my best judgement, deem them necessary.

enjoy, and thank you so much again!

* * *

There's nowhere in DXS that Mac is more at ease than down on one of the lower floors in R&D. The labs are lit with a kind of calm, blue toned overhead lighting and the banks of tables and equipment remind him of when he'd been in college, getting his degree in Engineering and Chemistry from CalTech. He doesn't have his own space down in Research – James would never hear of it – but he's ingratiated himself to enough people down there that there is usually an empty lab he has access to and permission to come and go from as he pleased. Most of his time at DXS when not on active assignment or doing some kind of training is spent down here.

The morning shift head of security, a terrifying woman named Heather who has a soft spot for him, told him once that more than one new recruit without much access to or interaction with field agents thought he was a ghost, spreading rumors the place was haunted by an agent killed on duty.

"It's how you flit around down here at all hours, you know," Heather told him one morning over the cappuccino he'd picked up for her on the way to work that day. (It paid to be on the good side of security and maintenance, he'd learned quickly.) She wiggled her fingers at him and arched one eyebrow. "Haunting the place."

He rolls his eyes at the memory, picking up a small screwdriver off the table and twisting a component of his latest project a quarter inch clockwise. He's in Whittacker and Tam's workspace today – probably his favorite of the Research labs he had access to. He likes them, the odd team of development techs whose primary focus was improving existing tech to work more efficiently, and they have a pretty tricked out lab too - perks of being two of the highest performing scientists on DXS payroll. It's probably why they haven't been told off too harshly for letting him be down here either. Mac had been half sure after he was late to his first meeting with Jack that the Director was going to crack down, forbid them from allowing him access or worse, give them a reprimand in their files. It's happened before, but these two are the crown jewel of R&D, which he supposes grants them more leeway than the more junior lab rats.

Mac blames this track of thought, the day he'd met his newest partner, for how his mind drifts back to their most recent mission together. The mission itself wasn't remarkable in its danger or difficulty; pretty run of the mill stuff, insofar as anything he does here can be remotely considered 'run of the mill'. That isn't why it's sticking in his mind, refusing to leave him be. It was Jack. Jack is hands down the most baffling person Mac has ever worked with – well, except maybe O'Reilly, but he'd been the bad kind of 'baffling', the kind that meant he'd ended up taking a shot at Mac himself the day their partnership fell apart and he'd been summarily fired. Jack is… good baffling, if that's an appropriate descriptor.

For the most basic level, he's reliable. He's reliable to the core, predictable and steady and unruffled by just about everything. No matter what came up - whatever 'harebrained nonsense', as the one before him had described it, Mac asked him to participate in - he never wavered. Sure he might look at Mac like he's nuts, might loudly complain that there was no rhyme, reason, or sanity to what they were doing, but he did it anyway, and he never let his guard fall off Mac's back the entire time. Which brought him to their most recent mission, the one that won't leave his head.

Jack had been standing guard outside where Mac was dealing with the actual mission objective itself, a fairly typical setup for them, when Mac had heard someone coming down the hall in the opposite direction. He'd then been confronted with a choice, much the same choice he'd had the day in Croatia that he'd been shot and Jack had flipped completely out about it, overreacting to a scratch and demanding to be read in immediately in any future danger, no matter the actual threat level. With this incident in mind, and all of the previous times when Jack had swiftly and soundly dispatched an issue before it became too pressing (sometimes before Mac even knew it existed, and wasn't that just unnerving as hell) along with it, Mac hesitated for only a moment before he refocused his attention on the task at hand, speaking quietly into his comms unit.

"Jack, I've got incoming."

And that had been the end of it. There had been a brief scuffle outside and Jack poked his head in the room, eyes doing a quick sweep before landing on Mac himself.

"You good?" he'd asked, and Mac had looked incredulously back at him, nodding with an element of 'duh' to it that he's sure didn't make him seem particularly adult, and Jack had nodded, satisfied. "Alright. Well, it's handled out here, you just keep doin' what you're doin', don't worry about anything else."

The part Mac can't get out of his mind is the fact that, after Jack had said that, he kind of… didn't. His attention had been split, of course, monitoring his perimeter with his peripheral vision and listening hard for every sound, but he got the feeling it was more out of habit than a sense of actual danger. Maybe it's the length of their partnership – already having spanned close to three months, far longer than his previous two partners, one who quit after their first mission, and the one James had fired when he'd fired Patti. Mac shuts that line of thought down quickly, swallowing around the lump in his throat and blinking hard. The tiny filament he's been working with snaps under the sudden pressure of how hard he'd gripped it and he cringes, dropping it onto the table surface.

Maybe he misses the previous Deputy Director more than he'd thought he did – more than he'd breathe a word of to anyone except maybe Bozer, who hardly knew half the story of what really happened in the purge. Even more than his partner's implication in the double-cross, he'd taken Patti's betrayal hard. It hurts to think about, even now, months later. He likes Matty, he does, but Patti had been there for years, working with James at DXS since Mac was still in college.

Forcing himself away from that particular topic, Mac carefully lifts a new filament out of a container and refocuses on Jack, on their mission. That alertness, what he remembers being described as 'hypervigilance' from one required after-action visit with a psychologist employed by DXS, had remained, but out of habit, too ingrained in him to turn off just like that. It was a shock to realize that, when Jack told him 'I've got this', Mac had actually believed him.

It's not a feeling he's entirely comfortable with, if Mac is completely honest. James had cautioned him about it repeatedly in the beginning, with his first partner and then again, after that first partner had…

After.

"They aren't here to babysit you," James had said, in the severe, intense voice that meant it was the Director talking, not Mac's father. "Your partner is here to make sure you don't miss something that will tank the mission or get someone killed. Get you killed, god forbid. But don't for a moment think that you can take your eyes off your surroundings. You can't ever be sure they're going to do their job, at least not enough that you can take your eyes off part of yours."

And he'd taken that to heart, and only slipped a few times since then. He'd paid dearly for his complacency too, his lapse in judgement allowing him to believe he could just hand over part of the mission to his partner and not have it come back to bite him. The reminder twinges in the side of his neck and Mac's hand goes up to it, rubbing over the scar that still aches sometimes, nerve endings that had been torn through by the bullet that nearly killed him never quite healing right. The consequences of trusting a partner is paying attention come steep.

Maybe, with where it keeps taking him, it's better if he stops thinking about past missions and partners at all. He's got his project down here, nothing on the docket for today, and to the best of his knowledge, James is on another continent assisting another team on an active mission. Whittacker and Tam are off rotation for the day, and Mac is free to spend as much time down in the lab as he wants. Maybe he'll even go home early, have a movie night with Bozer like he's been promising he'll make time for long enough that he's starting to feel guilty about it.

Leaning back in his chair, allowing himself to get lost in the project at hand, Mac relaxes in increments. He stops and flexes his fingers every now and then, his hands cramping slightly from the delicate work he's engaged in. Time slips away as he twists the softball-sized device to one side and the other, trying to figure out where he's going wrong, why it isn't functioning yet. Far from discouraging him though, the problems make him excited, little zings of energy running down his shoulders like a physical sensation. So wrapped up is he in what he's doing that when Jacks voice finally cuts through his focus, it's pretty clear he's had to say Mac's name more than once in a bid to get his attention.

"Mac!"

The volume of the word finally snaps Mac's attention off what he's doing and the device in his hands goes clattering down to the table, shoulder muscles seizing sharply up into startled tension. It takes several moments for his breathing to stutter back to a start, and he looks over at Jack, heart thundering in his chest like it's trying to break out.

"Sorry," the man in the doorway says, cringing, and to his credit, he seems like he actually is. It lacks the sarcastic bite of the way James would snap the word when he had to track Mac down here, _I'm sorry, Angus, was I interrupting you?_

"It's okay, I was just…" Mac waves a hand at the tools and pieces of hardware and circuitry on the worktable. He doesn't finish the explanation of what he'd just been doing, figuring that Jack didn't actually care, and he'd already had to stand there for long enough waiting to get Mac's attention, he didn't need some technical explanation of what he'd been doing down here. Not when Jack had obviously been looking for him for a reason, and he wasn't supposed to be down here in the first place. "It doesn't matter. Sorry. What did you, uh… What did you want?"

"We were gonna go over some training stuff, remember, they wanted us to get used to the new communicators before we have to use 'em in the field or whatever."

"Oh. Shit." So much for an empty schedule for the day. "Is it really…"

"Tuesday, my man, it is indeed. I know, sneaks up on you."

Mac squints at him, searching the words for a biting edge, a hidden reprimand he was supposed to glean from the rather placid, unbothered words themselves. The other shoe is going to drop any moment. There's only so much patience you can have with someone in a day, and despite having hardly seen him, Mac has already made several missteps with Jack today. They haven't had a major argument since Croatia, but he supposes it's a matter of time. And Jack knows he's been spoken to about this before, snapped at by James for this very reason in front of him the day they met, and several times after that to boot. Mac is not supposed to be wasting time 'mucking around in R&D', he's supposed to be focused on his actual job, and now his partner has had to hunt him down through the building in order to do that job. Jack has every reason to be pissed.

Jack... does not look pissed. He's leaning in the doorway, posture completely casual, not so much as frowning. His gaze is directed not at Mac, with the impatient, irritated look he'd been expecting, but rather at the table, at the half-finished project laying on it.

Figuring he should probably put that away so he can avoid wasting any more of Jack's time, Mac sits up straighter in the chair, looking around for the wheeled storage cart his favorite R&D team let him keep in their lab for his projects. He begins to sweep the pieces together to put away, apologizing again as he does.

"I'll be ready to go in a sec, I just gotta-" Mac swears again as one of the pieces, a short, round-ended screw, rolls off the table and goes skittering across the floor. "Sorry."

"That's four 'sorry's in like two minutes between the two of us, which is about three too many if you ask me," Jack says, seeming completely nonplussed by Mac's flustered disorganization. "Here." He's picked up the screw and walked over, setting it back down on the table.

Mac, growing more rigid, tenser with every step towards him Jack took, forces himself to calm down. Jack doesn't seem mad, and okay, sometimes people can be really good at hiding it, but his experience thus far has taught him that at the very least, when Jack is mad, you'll know about it. He's not the type to obfuscate what he's thinking unless it's for a mission, and it's made getting used to him easier than some partners Mac has had in the past.

"Thanks," he mutters, going to put the screw away in its compartment in a tray slid out from the wheeled storage unit but stopping when he hears an odd rolling sound. He looks to the side and frowns, confused.

Jack has pulled a chair over from a worktop across the room and is now sitting on it backwards, arms loosely folded over the back of it. He's scanning the contents of Mac's tray with interest, and waves a hand at it when he notices Mac looking at him.

"Don't stop on my account, you can keep going with your… What is it you're doing down here actually?"

Mac narrows his eyes at Jack. "Are you…" He hesitates, swallows, then finishes the question. "Are you asking because you actually want the answer, or?"

"Of course I'm asking 'cause I wanna know the answer, why else would I be asking?"

Now, despite the air that he gives off sometimes – probably deliberately, if Mac's hunch is correct – Mac knows for a fact that Jack is not an idiot. He is well aware that there are far more reasons to ask a person what they're up to besides a genuine desire to know the answer, and so he's either playing dumb for whatever reason, or he's specifically asking why he in particular would be asking if he didn't want to know – a direct challenge to Mac to either accept the question or call him out for ulterior motives.

It's a gamble, and one he isn't entirely sure will pay off, and he can't for the life of him come up with an explanation for why he takes the risk, but Mac gives it a shot. If this blows up in his face, well, the stakes are pretty low. He might get yelled at or told off or reported on to James but at least the cost won't be a blast nearly severing his carotid artery. It's much safer to push boundaries here, in the lab, where the worst that can happen is another writeup for being 'out of bounds'.

"You know those security doors with the fingerprint scanners," Mac starts slowly, wary eyes fixed on Jack, looking for any hint this conversation is about to go south.

"Sure do," Jack says, voice easy and relaxed, seeming genuinely engaged in the conversation.

"We have ways of getting around them, but I think with some combination of like… 3D printing technology, we can make a better system that has less hiccups and less risk of setting off alarms." Sensing himself getting excited about the project, Mac tries to reign it back in, forcing himself to shrug and cut off the longer explanation before it goes any further. "Y'know, it's whatever, just some idea I had the other night. Whittacker and Tam let me mess around in here when they're not using it, it's a good brain exercise I guess. Anyway, didn't we have training we needed to do?"

The quicker they get out of here, the less straining of Jack's patience Mac is going to have to do today, and while it's working out so far, interesting data to add to his existing information about his partner, there's no guarantee on when it will run out.

"Oh, that? That can wait, it's not important," Jack dismisses immediately, waving like he's physically shooing the task off the agenda. "I wanna hear more about this 3D printer doohickey you're putting together here."

"Doohickey," repeats Mac flatly. He doesn't understand what's going on and it's an uncomfortable feeling.

"Yeah."

Blinking hard, wondering absently if he might be having some sort of hyper-realistic dream, or maybe a stroke, Mac starts to explain. He tells Jack about the project in short, halting pieces, ready to be abruptly done having this strange, easygoing, pleasant conversation at any moment. That moment doesn't come. Instead, Jack encourages him to keep going, to show him what the components actually do, why he thinks it's going to work.

The longer he talks, Jack continuing to ask interested, serious questions, the more Mac relaxes. He feels his shoulders ease, coming down from where they'd practically hunched up around his ears.

After about forty-five minutes of just chatting, answering questions, Mac hears the chair roll again and looks over. It was kind of nice while it lasted, but Jack is… rolling himself over the dark-washed floor to the radio Tam leaves next to her station, flicking it on. It hums to life softly, strains of music floating through the workspace.

"Do you mind?" Jack asks when he notices Mac is watching him, wide-eyed and mouth slightly parted in a question he can't find the words to ask.

"No," he says, when he registers what it is Jack has asked him. "It's fine."

Jack flashes him an honest-to-god thumbs up and turns back to the radio, fiddling with the station dials. Mac predicts where he's going to settle without meaning to, expecting Los Angeles ninety-five point five, the classic rock station, a moment before Jack locates it.

Mac has to admit after a while, silently and within the privacy of his own mind, that it's kind of nice, working there in the lab with Jack watching him in relatively non-obtrusive fascination. It's weird and he can't quite figure out what kind of motive Jack might be operating with, but figuring that whatever it is, he can deal with it when it comes up, Mac just lets it happen. The company is actually pleasant, with Jack asking smart questions about what he's doing and actually paying attention to the answer. It's clear he doesn't really understand what Mac is doing with his project, but he thinks it's interesting, and wants to try and get what he's doing. It reminds him of Bozer, in a way, of when he's tinkering with the toaster or something and his roommate is plaster-casting his latest movie prop.

It's when Jack pulls out his phone, and Mac catches the sound of what he thinks is Candy Crush before he clicks the volume to silent, that he comes to the conclusion that really, Jack does intend to just… sit here, hanging out for what appears to be the foreseeable future. He'd figured that, given what he does for his day job, most things probably should've lost the ability to surprise him by now, but he supposes there's exceptions to every rule, and maybe this is it. Mac can diffuse a bomb that would make a lot of garden variety EOD techs cry, but he can't figure out this weird easygoing partner with the cowboy accent and the bizarre habit of fussing, both on missions and off. This is where he's finally stumped.

As the day ticks on, Jack finally makes it clear that maybe watching Mac tinker in the lab isn't the entire reason he's down here, when he puts his phone away and sits up in the chair, righted to its proper orientation since his radio adjustment.

"So, what went wrong on that mission that you didn't tell me about?"

The question is straightforward, blunt, and blindsides Mac completely.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says, and he really doesn't. He knows Jack doesn't believe him, though, by the way the man's eyes narrow and a frown takes up residence on his face.

"I mean everything went just fine, but the whole plane home you had this look on your face like you were trying to solve a puzzle, when, far as I could tell, the puzzle was done and solved. And it's not your usual puzzle-face either, it's your 'I should've solved this already and it's making me annoyed that I haven't' face."

The observation strikes Mac deeply uncomfortably, like he'd been moving about his day as usual and suddenly realized his front door had been left wide open, all of his neighbors afforded a clear view right inside. He feels seen, personally and piercingly, and he doesn't know that he likes that feeling.

"I don't have a face like that," he tries, absolutely sure even before Jack makes a face at him that it's not going to work.

"Don't bullshit me, kid, we've been working together longer than any of my jobs have lasted since I got discharged, I know you have a face. So what gives? What puzzle'd we miss? You're gonna have to help me out here, because we did everything we went to do with only the routine amount of knocking heads together."

And he's right. They had done everything _they_ went to do. Mac, though, he hadn't. There was a side request James had made of him, right before they left. He'd gotten word that there was intel in the area on a personal project of his, the white whale to James' Captain Ahab. There's a man out there somewhere in the world, a man named Walsh, who James has been hunting for as long as Mac can remember. And every time he sends Mac and his partner of the moment somewhere he's picked up chatter of Walsh's presence, he makes a point of pulling his son aside and asking him to keep his eyes peeled. So far, he hasn't turned anything up, and he can feel the cold disappointment in James' gaze every time he comes home empty handed.

James had been sure they'd had a real lead on him this time, too. Nothing.

"Everything is fine," Mac says, trying to sound reassuring. He doesn't think he quite succeeds, but he tries anyway, committing and doubling down. "Promise. I just was slower than I wanted to be because my strategy didn't work out the way I thought it would, and I was replaying it."

It doesn't feel good, lying to Jack, but since he's not likely to last past the six month mark anyway, Mac doesn't feel too bad about it either. Jack accepts the explanation, picking his phone back up and re-starting his game. Or at least, he seemed to accept it, until a few moments pass and his voice sounds again, quiet and calm but deadly serious.

"Whatever it is you're not telling me," he says, not looking up, "if it gets dangerous, you will."

It's not a question, and Mac knows it isn't a request either. He tries to smile and fails, looking back down at his own work.

"Okay," he lies. He won't, but soon, it won't matter anyway. Besides – how dangerous could it really get?


	8. Something's Gotta Give

posting may slow down just a touch as school ramps up but i'm still writing ahead at a steady clip, so no worries, we're going strong. [heart emoji] i post chapter promo graphics/meandering thoughts on tumblr, where you can find me at altschmerzes! come say hi!

(chapter title from all time low's 'something's gotta give', for those of you playing along with my little soundtrack)

* * *

It was another one of those missions where Mac goes and goes until he's running on fumes and still doesn't really sleep. It's hard for him to sleep on missions, and the more complicated, stressful, or high stakes the work is, the more difficult it becomes. It's not that he doesn't try - he'll put his head down in the safe houses they stay in, he'll lean back in his chair on the jet, but whenever he tries to close his eyes they snap open again, heart kicking into high gear and breath catching in his chest. Mac can't imagine what the DXS-employed psychologist would have to say about that, but he's never deigned to bring it up. Instead he toughs it through missions that require long enough stays away from home that sleeping becomes a real problem, and crashes when he returns.

Again, Jack drives him home. He doesn't ask if Mac wants a ride this time, just says he'll bring the car around and then does so. They weren't even gone that long that time, but Jack still insists on driving him. While he probably could have driven home okay, Mac does find he's too tired to fight his partner about it, so he goes along with it. He gives a little sarcastic wave from the door when he looks back and sees that Jack is still at the end of the driveway, like he's waiting to leave until he sees Mac get inside in one piece. Because he can't walk inside his house on his own, apparently.

Later, after he's had a nap and reheated something out of the fridge for dinner, Mac's phone buzzes on the coffee table in front of the couch. He leans over and peers at it, the late hour making his eyes fuzzy. He blinks at it a few times to clear his vision and read the name displayed on the screen. _Jack Dalton._ With a snort, Mac reaches out and snags it, eyes flicking over the short message on the screen.

"That from Jack?"

Mac looks over at Bozer, who's sitting on the other end of the couch working on a script he's been writing, and puts the phone down without answering the text. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

"You've got a face. So do you still need a ride in tomorrow?"

On days in the past when Mac has been so tired after a job that he was unable to drive home and took a rideshare service or caught a begrudging ride with James, Bozer has given him a ride back to the lot his car was left in the next morning. Mac, while appreciating the kindness and Bozer's willingness to go out of his way, he's never really been comfortable with the arrangement. Though DXS was designed to be completely under the radar even from the interior of the actual lobby, it's entirely too close to his worlds colliding for Mac. It feels like his carefully constructed house of cards is moments from toppling and scattering every time Bozer sets eyes on the building.

He can't shake what his father had said to him, when he'd started at DXS and refused to move out of the house he shared with Bozer, either on his own or back in with James, and ignored the advice to kick his roommate out as well. The man had stared him straight in the face for a long, silent moment, and then said, in no uncertain terms, and he had to be aware of what he was doing by keeping Bozer so close in his life. What he was risking.

James said, deadly serious, that if Mac told Bozer anything but his provided cover of a high security clearance think tank employee, then he would be putting him in unimaginable danger. Mac would be, in James' words, functionally putting a gun to his best friend's head and pulling the trigger. It was an image that he'd never shaken, and it plays uninvited through his mind whenever Bozer gives him a ride to work.

"No, I don't need a ride," Mac says, shaking his head and forcing it out. "Jack's gonna pick me up in the morning, I guess."

Accepting favors from Jack without knowing when or how he's going to come collecting on them is not something Mac wants to be doing. However it's preferable - barely - to having Bozer anywhere near his job.

"No complaints from me." A slight pause, then Bozer is quick to add, "Not that I mind, obviously, it's just, the hours you work are insane and I, unlike you, value sleep on a regular basis."

"If you had your way," Mac says, matching his tone, "the day would start at eleven in the morning at the absolute earliest."

"You're damn right." The teasing grin on Bozer's face breaks into a wide yawn, and he shoves the script off his lap and onto the coffee table. "Alright. I'm about to turn into a pumpkin. Try not to give Jack too hard a time tomorrow." He gets up and rounds the couch, walking behind it towards the hallway down which lies his and Mac's rooms.

As Bozer passes behind where Mac is sitting, he reaches over and clasps Mac's shoulder in a wordless 'goodnight'. Mac catches and squeezes his wrist in return, the moment of affection leaving him feeling warm even after Bozer has left the room. It's the type of thing he appreciates Bozer for, fiercely and privately. Nobody else in his life really… touches him much, if it at all. He's at arm's length - literally and figuratively - from most of his coworkers, and if anyone puts hands on him on a mission, it ends in blacked eyes and split lips. And his father… James is the opposite of Bozer. Impossible to read half the time, and Mac can't remember the last time the man hugged him. His roommate, though, is a different story.

Bozer is as open and affectionate as James is shuttered and cold. He always welcomes Mac back home with a tight, relieved hug. He's safe and familiar and kind, and Mac almost wonders if he'd be better off if he didn't have Bozer around, that one source of easy, simply expressed care and fun. He knows it isn't true, practically speaking, but he sometimes entertains the thought that maybe it's Bozer that keeps him human, and maybe being human feels like more trouble than it's worth.

Sometimes, times like now, slumped against the arm of the couch and tired enough that even his internal filters are failing, Mac allows himself to mull over the concept of what it would be like if he just… wasn't. He closes his eyes and permits himself the daydream that he's an android, a robot, artificial intelligence brought to life. Perfect and moldable and precise. Infallible, without this inconvenient human body that bruises and breaks and wears down, the mind that makes mistakes and lets the heart that aches lonely in his ribcage override it far too often. Without the skin that burns to be touched, held. He'd be all the good parts of himself, the ones that make James proud, and none of the bad, the ones that make his father look at him like coming home had been a mistake, all those years ago.

Or, if he has to be human, Mac thinks, opening his eyes and looking at the wall, he could at least do himself and everyone around him the decency of not being the sort that gets thrown into a melodramatic tailspin of acute loneliness by someone touching his shoulder. He may as well be ten years old, for all the maturity he's demonstrating right now, and it's with this thought, accompanied by a spike of irritation, that he gets up.

Time to interrupt that unproductive line of thinking and go to bed before he's completely out of it on the ride in tomorrow. The last thing Mac needs to add to this partnership is to make a fool of himself when Jack is already going out of his way for him. As he passes the cracked door of his roommate's room, the lack of light seeping out of it indicating he's gone to bed for real, Mac cringes. He regrets the brief idea that he'd be better off without his best friend in his life, no matter the reasoning - there's no world where having Bozer around doesn't make him a better version of himself, and he knows it. He'd apologize, if it weren't for the fact that Bozer wouldn't have any idea what he was talking about. So he just mouths 'sorry' at the closed door, and heads for his own room.

By the time Mac realizes he set the wrong alarm the next morning, it's going off and he's running thirty minutes late. He bolts his way through his morning, running out of the house to meet Jack with his hair still wet from the shower and without having eaten breakfast. He's flustered and rushed, and when he finally gets himself and his work bag into the car, closing the door and turning to apologize to his partner for running late, he's confronted with Jack's bright, smiling face. He seems completely unbothered, and Mac can't figure out is going on here.

If he's Jack, he's seeing his partner has shown up late and unprepared, after he'd already needed to be driven home the day before, and that's not something to grin about. And yet there he sits, like everything is completely fine, nothing's gone wrong, and Mac doesn't have anything to be embarrassed about. It throws him off enough that he almost glares back on instinct and asks what the hell he thinks is so funny, but he catches it just in time, choking down the words and forcing his brow to unfurrow before it can become a full-blown frown.

Jack is trying. He's trying an awful lot harder than most all of his past partners to make their working relationship not just function but function _well_, and he seems like he's trying to be a friend to Mac to boot. It doesn't make any sense, and Mac is still trying to work out what he gets out of it, what his angle is, but in the mean time, it's not fair to be rude to him when he's putting this much effort in. So Mac swallows hard and returns the smile, hoping it looks halfway genuine. Jack just keeps grinning back, and pulls away from the curb to start on the drive to work.

It's a nice morning, and with the coffee that Jack has inexplicably brought for him as well, Mac finds himself relaxing and waking up fully. Jack keeps up a steady stream of chatter about nothing of particular importance, commenting on the flight home from their last mission, the traffic on the main street by Mac's house, and the line at the coffee shop he'd stopped at on the way. The radio is on again, the same station Jack always listens to, LA ninety-five point five. It reminds him of the day in the Research lab, sitting there working on his project with Jack just hanging out, chatting about anything and nothing at all. It had been a good day and the thought gives Mac the hope that, despite his late start, today might be a good day too.

When they arrive in the parking lot, Jack gets out of the car and starts to round it, heading for the building. Mac stops, though, putting his work bag on the seat and reaching deep into it, pulling out a locked case. He fishes the small key out of a compartment on the outside of the bag and unlocks it, taking from inside it the gun he's required to carry on missions and holstering it as his hip. He doesn't wear it at home, or leaving the house, in case Bozer notices something, but also because he hates the thing. Mac hates owning the gun, hates using it even at the range, hates so much as touching the thing. The longer he can postpone it the better.

It's settled against his leg now, and he turns to Jack, flashing a thumbs-up and a tight-lipped smile. They head towards DXS together, and Mac hopes Jack doesn't notice his awkward gait, still trying to get used to the gun, like he has to every time he wears it. It feels like he's got a live bomb strapped to his waist, like there's some kind of monster latched onto his thigh with claws dug in so deep that one wrong move would cause them to sever an artery. He'd never wear the thing if he had an option, but James hadn't given him one when he'd been hired on.

The gun isn't optional, carrying it or knowing how to use it. James has a close eye on him about it, too, requiring him to recertify at the shooting range, an instructor evaluating his marksmanship every couple of months or so. Mac knows his father doesn't trust him to keep up with his training regarding the weapon, knowing full well how much he hates the thing, and James has taken precautions to keep him in line about it.

The man himself is waiting inside ready to brief them when Mac and Jack walk in, and he doesn't look pleased about the ten minutes that have passed since their arranged meeting time.

"Why is your hair wet, did you really not get up in time to dry your hair before you came to work this morning, Angus?" The tone is incredulous and unimpressed, and Mac can feel his cheeks heat up. He looks to the side, avoiding making eye contact with James, and hopes he'll move past it now that he's aired his immediate criticism with Mac's appearance.

Luckily, he seems satisfied with that and moves on quickly. Mac shuffles completely into the room and turns his attention to the screens that have come alight on the wall, deliberately not looking at Jack. If Jack has some sort of opinion about either James' comment or the state of Mac's hair, he doesn't want to know about it. The first thing he sees is a map of Brazil, with the section containing Rio de Janeiro circled and enlarged. It wouldn't be the first time he's ever been to the area, but it's been at least a year and a half, and the last time he was there, it hadn't gone well.

That had been while he was working alongside a man named Adam O'Reilly, a partnership that had ended with O'Reilly mistaking him for a hostile and taking a shot at him. Only his own reflexes, catching sight in the reflection of a screen of a barrel pointed at him seconds before it was fired, had saved his life that day. It was after that incident that Mac stopped arguing with James about making him carry a gun. Even including the partner he'd been working with when a lapse in judgement allowed him to be shot in the neck, nearly dying alone in an alley in Stockholm, had left less of an impression on him than that man had. There wasn't a day that he and O'Reilly were working together that Mac hadn't been quietly terrified, absolutely no idea what he was about to do next or how he was going to react.

(It reminded him of James. A more trigger happy, manic James, but his father none the less, the same kind of unpredictable roller coaster, happy with him one day, furious the next, and indifferent in between.)

So, given who he'd been with last time, just the two of them alone in an unfamiliar place, he's not extremely excited about the idea of going back to Rio again to repeat the situation. Even if the partner he's with this time isn't anything like O'Reilly had been.

James doesn't waste any time launching straight into the problem. The problem, in a nutshell, seems to be that there is a man hiding out in a warehouse somewhere in Rio, who has built the technological equivalent of a time bomb. He's an American national already wanted on cybercrimes charges in his home state of Vermont, and the tech found when Homeland Security raided his apartment was quite near the most advanced they'd ever seen. There's a time frame during which he has to be apprehended and the program he's written stopped, or a cyberterrorist event will target the internal systems of countless of local and regional governments. It doesn't sound like a big deal on its head, but the chaos and costs and general panic involved in just one city losing the ability to access or use its networks, nevermind a dozen or more, is a major threat, to be dealt with swiftly and soundly.

Not to mention what will happen if this man is successful, and this tips off a string of copycats, who attempt to recreate the event. Anyone else who has the skill to pull it off could witness the fallout and decide to try it themselves, for either generalized chaos or to essentially hold an entire city hostage. It's a bad outcome with the potential for a global cascade effect, and for the good of everyone with the potential to be involved, it needs to be stopped before it can get anywhere near that far.

Mac is nodding along, with James that far on the explanation of what they're being sent to do and why, and he doesn't see any kind of issue with the proposed plan of action. That is, until the end of the briefing arrives, and he sees a glaring error, a major piece of the mission that's been completely overlooked.

"Uh, dad," he says, realizing his mistake a fraction of a moment after the word leaves his mouth. The expression on James' face has gone from a determined neutral, to an irritated frown, lips pursed together and eyes narrowed. He holds up a hand, and Mac knows what's coming before he says it.

"We have _talked_ about this," James hisses at him, as if lowering his voice somewhat at all makes this conversation private. Jack is standing no farther from him than Mac is, and if Mac can hear him perfectly clearly, it stands to reason Jack can too, and his cheeks burn at the thought.

"I know, I'm sorry," he says quickly, in an attempt to forestall the rest of the reprimand before it happens. No luck. Once James is started on something, there's no stopping him, especially if he feels as if he's been disobeyed, disrespected, or like Mac isn't representing him well as both his top agent and the sole legacy of the family name.

"While we are in this building," James continues, voice sharp and quiet, and Mac wants the floor to open up and swallow him whole, "I am not your father. I am the Director of this agency and you will remember to address me with respect. It's _sir_ or _Director_ and _nothing else,_ do you understand me?"

Mac nods shortly. His throat feels tight, and his face is on fire. He's sure that if he could see himself right now he'd be flushed bright red. This is one of the most humiliating dressing-downs he's received in front of Jack so far, and he can't imagine it's doing anything to improve his partner's image of him. If anything, it reinforces the idea that Mac is a petulant child, gotten where he is for no reason other than by virtue of who his father is. James has a tendency of speaking to him like an incompetent toddler, and Mac knows it's influenced some of his partners in the past. How could it not? He's the Director.

The hope that this was all over seems to be futile, because when he looks back over, James is still staring at him expectantly. It's clear what he's expecting - a nod isn't sufficient, and he wants a verbal response.

"Yes, sir," Mac says, marginally proud of how his voice manages to rise above a whisper and sound halfway solid. "I understand." He resolutely does not allow his eyes to wander over to where Jack is standing. The man hasn't said a word, and whatever his face is doing, it's not going to be a good element to add to this situation.

"Good. Now can we get on with it?" James doesn't wait for an answer and turns back to his presentation of the information.

They can't, actually, get on with it, however. Because, regardless of his slip up with addressing his father as 'dad' in front of work colleagues, the original problem Mac was trying to raise persists. And they can't really do anything else before it's addressed.

"No, we can't," he says, and moves on before James can speak again, having whipped back around and given him a wide-eyed look that clearly says 'I know you're not actually embarrassing me like this in front of your partner'. "The cyberterrorist we're going after, he's good. From what you said, he's better than good, might be one of the best hackers we've ever run into. There's no way he doesn't have fail-safes in place for if he gets interrupted before he plans to launch his attack."

"I'm sure he does," James agrees, giving him a withering look. "Great job, you've identified a basic characteristic of a half-decent criminal, Angus, what's your point?"

"My point is I'm not a computer specialist, and neither is Jack." There's a quiet snort from Mac's left, Jack making it pretty clear what he thinks of the idea of him being any kind of computer specialist. The day down in the lab comes to mind, Jack referring to the 3D printer he'd been attempting to miniaturize as a 'doohickey'. It would be enough to make Mac laugh, if it weren't for the fact that he's hyper-aware of the expression on his father's face, indicating James is not taking his concern about the technical aspect of this mission seriously.

"Neither of us are computer specialists," Mac repeats, gesturing over at the screen, "and this guy is about as highly specialized as you can get. Whatever his systems look like, whatever failsafes he's set up? I don't think I'm qualified to deal with it."

The look on James' face doesn't change, and he waves a hand dismissively. "You'll figure something out," he says. "I have complete faith in you and you haven't let me down on a mission yet, not one like this. I know you can do it."

With that announcement, that leaves Mac feeling even less reassured than he'd been before, which is saying something, James turns and sweeps out of the room.


	9. Reckless But Honest Words

y'all even know how excited i am for the next chapter given what's - WHO'S - introduced in this one. i'm PUMPED. please enjoy chapter nine!

it does contain uh. slightly stronger language than previously used here, though. not much but a couple times.

(title from sleeping at last's 'anger'. tbh most of my true north playlist is sleeping at last.)

* * *

"Well he was in a great mood," Jack says, as soon as the door has swung shut behind James and the man has moved safely out of earshot.

Mac finally looks over at him, making eye contact with him for the first time since they made it into the briefing room. There's something in his expression like he's just tasted something distinctly unpleasant but is trying to hide it to save the feelings of the person who'd served it to him, or maybe like he's walked into a room with a nasty smell but is trying to remain polite about it. Displeasure, nearing disgust, but well camouflaged, visible to Mac only because of the hours spent in each other's company and his time-honed skill of seeing past what people want him to see. The question remains what he's so unimpressed with - James or Mac himself.

After a few moments' wavering consideration, throat dry and unsure this is a good idea, Mac decides to take a risk.

"I don't know if you've picked up on this by now," he says, raising an eyebrow at Jack when the man looks away from James' retreating back and over at him, "but he's literally always like that. Trust me, I've had twenty-three years to get used to it."

The short burst of laughter Jack lets out is half surprise half amusement, and Mac feels his cheeks heat just the slightest bit. He ducks his head and allows himself to smile for a moment, relieved he'd made the right call. It's nice in the moment, but it doesn't last, and too soon he feels the weight of his ignored concerns pressing down hard on him, making his lungs constrict. James hadn't given a moment's attention to his concern, which only made the worry grow that much stronger.

The thought doesn't leave him. It hangs, a persistent shadow in the echo of every move, every moment.

_I can't do this. I'm not going to be able to do this. If I have to do this, I'm going to fail._

It stays while they mill around the office, restlessly waiting for the plane and ground support to be prepped, and it stays with him once they're in the air, too. He sits with the briefing folder open in his lap, flipped to the carefully compiled page discussing the actual technical aspects of what their hacker has built. There's distressingly little information there, most of the collected intel to do with the man himself, one Theo Rasmussen out of Montpelier, Vermont. He'd gone to MIT for his degree, and was well regarded in the cybersecurity world until he pulled off an electronic heist netting close to three million dollars and disappeared to who knows where.

'Who knows where' turned out to be Rio, where he'd resurfaced on radar with the threat of terrorism he's about to carry out. There's page after page of info from locals, people who'd met him or seen him or heard from him, old colleagues who'd been interviewed. Even his college roommate, who Rasmussen hadn't seen or spoken to in ten years, warranted three pages of notes and intelligence. Everything had been meticulously looked into, in the years he'd been an international fugitive and since his resurfacing. Everything except what he was actually using to carry out the threatened attack. Terrifyingly little was known about the software, let alone how to disable it, and Mac knows as sure as he's ever known anything that it's far above his skill level.

For the caliber of Rasmussen's training and prior evidence of his abilities, it's probably above the skill level of most of DXS's employed cyber team. Normally, teams like his and Jack's would have a dedicated tech person, but ever since James cleaned house, they've all been spread so thin that of the _maybe_ three people left capable of handling this sort of thing, not one could be permanently assigned to anyone or anything. And, Mac knew for a fact that all three of them were occupied and unable to be reached.

Jack knows he's worried about the mission. He's been watching Mac out of the corner of his eye the entire time, since his concern was shot down by James. Mac has felt his gaze, a piercing reminder that Jack sees him and has developed a generally successful ability to to see right through him, the entire time, and it's not helping.

A few times, Mac has come perilously close to shooting out a hand and grabbing hold of Jack's forearm, grip tight and urgent. The words rise in his throat so insistent that they choke him, _I can't do this, I'm not kidding, Jack, this is something I can't just 'figure out', I really, really can't do it._

But he doesn't. He keeps his mouth shut and his eyes fixed on his folder, right until they touch down in Brazil.

"Ever been to Rio before?"

The question Jack asks launches him backwards in time, slamming him down into this very seat, a very different man sitting across from him, a man with wild green eyes and a scar on his chin he got in a bar fight.

"_So, MacGyver,"_ Adam O'Reilly had asked, a wicked grin on his face, "_ever been to Rio before?"_

"Yeah," Mac says shortly, blinking hard and replacing O'Reilly with Jack, the person who is actually here with him this time. "Once." That's all he says, and Jack must sense it's not a fun story, because he doesn't ask for any more than that.

Rasmussen himself is not extremely hard to catch. They have enough intel to track him down fairly quickly to the shack-like house he's been hiding out in, deep in a run-down neighborhood halfway up a winding hill road. It seems once he released his threat to the world, he didn't really much care about keeping a low profile, and while Mac doesn't understand why he would suddenly decide to risk everything after so long successfully flying under the radar, he's not exactly _unhappy_ it's an easy collar. Maybe the man got confused about Brazil's extradition policies and forgot that once you threaten international security, there's not a court on the planet that won't prosecute you.

Not so much as a single gunshot is exchanged in the capture. Another team from DXS is close behind them to round Rasmussen up for transport to the local jail and from there to the appointed court that would see out the consequences for several counts of international cyberterrorism and whatever else he'd been up to since fleeing Vermont years ago. As they leave with their would-be terrorist in tow, escorted by several highly trained agents in an armored truck, Mac and Jack are left behind to deal with Rasmussen's hide-out, and the fact that he may not be a 'would-be' terrorist so much as a successful one depending on how the next twelve hours go.

Because twelve hours is almost exactly how much time they have. Mac had found an egg timer of all things, on the messy desk littered with foil wrappers and empty bottles of 5 Hour Energy shots. He'd grabbed it and bolted outside as quickly as possible, shoving the thing at the retreating back of Rasmussen, handcuffed and being escorted to the armored truck that would ferry him away. And when the agents leading him had let him turn around and face the fierce demand of what it was for, the man had only smirked and said, "It's already too late."

Rasmussen must have started the timer as soon as they'd begun to come up the road to his hideout, because only a few minutes have passed on the twelve hour clock. It stands to reason that, given the monitor screen shows activity progressing on its own, sans a person at the keyboard to control it, this is how much time they have left before the system deploys and catastrophic consequences fall in its wake.

Mac wastes no time sitting down in the worn, dangerously wobbling chair at the work station and taking a look to see if there's anything he can do. His hands, resting lightly on the desk in front of the keyboard, not even touching it yet, are shaking ever so slightly, and he knows before he even looks what the conclusion is going to be.

There's nothing he can do. Even just from looking at it he knows it's too complex, too wrapped and warped into itself, too precariously put together, and if he tries anything, best case scenario they're stuck here for hours and it goes off anyway. Worst case scenario, he tries to unpiece the puzzle and it triggers the thing early, and any chance they had of this thing ending without mass chaos is gone in a digital puff of smoke.

_At least with a bomb,_ he thinks, a shade hysterically, _there's something you can see, you can touch. This is all imaginary numbers floating through cyberspace._

Imaginary numbers floating through cyberspace or not, the fallout will be very, very real, and Mac realizes with a panic that seizes his lungs in iron claws, he has no idea what he's supposed to do now.

_I knew it. I knew it, I fucking knew it, I tried to tell him, and he wouldn't listen and now- I have to call Nikki._

The thought springs forward, crystal clear and perfectly still, and Mac chokes on an audible laugh that almost bursts its way out of his chest. Nikki Carpenter. That's what he's supposed to do now. He's supposed to pull out his phone and call her, the best good-guy hacker he's ever known, to come and deal with the problem with flying fingers and deceptive ease. Hell, she's supposed to be here already, being the computer analyst and technician semi-permanently assigned to Mac and his partner of the day. Except she isn't here. And Mac can't call her.

Nikki is gone. He remembers the day he got the call from James that something was wrong, there had been a breach of security and he had to get to the office immediately. It had been eleven forty-five at night, and he'd bolted out of bed to the sound of his ringing phone, and then stumbled to his car to get to DXS so fast he'd put his shoes on the wrong feet and hadn't even noticed until six hours later. He'd stood in an office with his father, listening to James shout at someone, maybe multiple someones, on the phone, while pandemonium reigned outside the glass doors.

His partner was the first one he saw escorted out, Derek Riggs, who he'd only been partnered with three weeks, since his partner before that, Daisy Bradley, had quit after one mission. He hadn't felt much about Riggs, not having had time to hardly learn the man's name, but it was Patricia Thornton that went next, handcuffed and staring straight ahead, face carved from stone. Mac had felt his breath leave his lungs in a whoosh, leaving him airless and frozen, and that's when he'd seen her, led through by another pair of stricken looking, hurried agents. Nikki was being frog-marched from the building, and he could see her yelling something at one of the people leading her out, and just for a moment, over the nameless woman's shoulder, they'd made eye contact. Mac tried to muster the ability to say something, anything, that she might be able to at least lip read through the glass, but it happened too fast, and before he was able to, she was gone.

Since then, he hasn't seen or heard from her. Mac spotted her name on a list of 'identified co-conspirators and facilitators' when James was going over who had been identified and forced out during what had come to be colloquially referred to in hushed tones as 'the purge' - or, with some specific people, 'the Director's breakdown'. James never talked about it afterwards, exactly how he'd found out who was involved in the infiltration, and how he'd known Nikki was one of them, and then there was a new woman sitting in Patti's office and a new man walking in the door being introduced as Mac's partner, and he had bigger fish to fry than arranging for a new IT person.

Well. _Had_ bigger fish to fry. Right now the absolute biggest fish possible at the moment is sitting in front of him and he can't pick up and call the one person he knows who'd have a snowball's chance in hell of catching it.

"I can't do this." The words come out quietly, in a tone that is the serene calm of someone whose stress levels have short-circuited and left them without the ability to feel much of anything at all. "I was right back home, it's too complicated. I can't do this and now I… I don't know what to do." Another slightly hysterical laugh bubbles up in his throat, and he swallows it back down. "I don't know what to do. There's nothing I can do."

"Okay," Jack says slowly, and Mac can see the gears in his head spinning, the firm mask of calm cracked at the edges. "Well. What do we do now? This is the first time this has come up, what's the protocol here?"

"Protocol is we call in someone upper level in IT. Teams like ours, the handful that get sent out on stuff like this, we call our assigned computer specialist. Really, our specialist should be with us already." Mac gives the information in the same rote monotone he'd slipped into that first day on Jack's tour of the office. He's explained the same concept to numerous new partners before - it becomes second nature after a while. Except this time, there's a problem. A big one.

"I sense a 'but' coming, Mac, but what?"

Once again, Jack is square on the nose.

"But we can't. Because Nikki got fired with my last partner when my- when the Director investigated the breach. So we don't have one." It's the short version, but Mac has neither the time nor the energy for the long version. Luckily, Jack doesn't ask for it.

"You're not done, because that can't be it, or we'd be calling somebody else's. What's the rest of it? Why aren't we just calling someone else's specialist?"

At least Derek Riggs, that last partner who'd been fired along with Nikki, hadn't had the time to get to know him this well. The man had seemed observant, if a little boring, and Mac is finding he isn't comfortable with the feeling of being known this acutely by a person he hasn't quite figured out yet.

"IT probably got hit the hardest when he, y'know. Did what he did." Lost his damn mind, he hears morning security chief Heather say. Mac is never sure how to talk about what happened, especially not with Jack, who hadn't been there to see it first hand. "All that information, if he had even a question about someone…" Mac shakes his head. "Natalie, Amos, and Cristina. That's all that's left of who could handle this kind of thing. I'm dead sure none of our home base team could make heads or tails of this programming, and they'd probably set it off trying."

"Okay, so we call Natalie or Amos or Cristina."

"We can't," Mac says, cringing. "They're all on assignment. Busy week I guess. None of them could get here fast enough, not with what they're already working on. There's nobody to call."

_Nobody to call_ he sees Jack mouth in silent echo. Thunder clouds have gathered on his brow, and Mac feels the panic building up again. He doesn't know what to do. He's Angus MacGyver, the one who always comes up with a plan B, or a plan H, or a plan W, and he doesn't know what to do. There's nothing-

"I know who to call."

The statement slices through the thoughts swirling turbulently inside Mac's head, cutting them into stillness with just five words.

"What?" he asks, voice surely coming out sounding as dumbstruck as he feels. "Who?"

* * *

Matty Webber is not having a good day. To say she'd come to expect this in her position at DXS wouldn't be untrue, but since things calmed and settled, so too had she. With Jack installed as Mac's partner, not only does she have one less wayward young agent to be constantly worried about, she also has someone she trusts here with her. And in this building where she keeps uncovering half-truths and egos and things that just won't add up, that's becoming invaluable, even just for her peace of mind.

If it weren't for this being the type of place and the type of personnel she has been looking to work with her entire professional life - with a few notable exceptions - she's not sure she'd have taken the position in the first place, never mind stayed once she got here. And then there's the matter of her and Jack's under the table investigation. Matty has never been one to believe in performative humility over plain truth, and the plain truth is, she doesn't know if she trusts anyone else in her place to unspool what it is that's going on here before it gets someone killed. Assuming, of course, that it hasn't done so already.

She'd remembered James MacGyver, when she'd gotten the initial offer of the job, and it was with mixed feelings that she'd reflected on her old colleague. He'd been efficient and razor sharp, the best there was at what he did, but there was nothing about him that made her see him as Director material - of anything.

James is as arrogant as he is brilliant, with a knack for small and careless cruelty. It's death by a thousand cuts to spend more than an hour in a room with him. He either doesn't recognize or doesn't care about the kind of impact he has on the people around him. And Matty has already established that he's far too intelligent not to recognize it. It was James himself that gave her pause when she'd gotten the invitation, but she'd naively believed that maybe he'd grown in the years since she knew him, that she might be able to balance him and together they could make a great team.

So far, well. It's too soon to tell, yet.

The shrill tone of her personal phone spears through the stifling quiet of her office, and Matty squints at it suspiciously. It's Jack's name that's come up, and if he's calling her personal rather than her desk phone, it has to be important. As she leans over to grab it, she reaches in the opposite direction to snag the active mission folder from the inbox folder to her left. Rio, she sees, flipping it open at the same time as she slides the answer bar across the screen and says into the phone, far past bothering with pleasantries when it came to Jack Dalton, "What do you want?"

It goes to exactly how serious the situation is that he doesn't immediately make some crack about being hurt she doesn't sound happier to hear from him. Jack launches into it immediately, outlining quickly for her exactly what has gone wrong with their trip to Brazil to apprehend Theo Rasmussen and stop his program before it can wreak international havoc.

"Okay," she says, when he's sufficiently brought her up to speed, still multitasking and scanning pages from the folder. "What can I do?"

"I need a favor from you. Do you know where the Director is right now?"

James MacGyver does not appear to be having a very good day, either, at least not once he sees Matty walking into his office with her phone held up to her ear. He gets progressively unhappier after she switches it to speakerphone, and Jack does the same on his end, Mac taking over explaining what's going on in Rio. James asks questions, and Mac answers them, and the longer the conversation goes, the more worked up they both seem to be getting, volume escalating on both ends of the call.

Matty, on her end, is not impressed. If there is one area of his conduct at DXS that disappoints her the most about James, it's any time Mac is involved. His behavior regarding his son is harsh and erratic, and she gets the feeling that she doesn't know the half of it. It's a bad look on a Director, and frankly, it's a bad look on a father.

"So why haven't you _called_ someone already," James snaps at the phone, interrupting Mac mid-sentence. Matty would like to just hand the thing to him and leave, but her own sense of accountability to Mac and Jack combined with her lack of faith that he won't just chuck it at the wall when he hangs up keeps her in the room.

"I _would have_ except that when you fired Nikki you also fired _every-fucking-body else_ and there is nobody left to call."

It's the first time Matty has heard Mac either shout or use that strong of language in the entire time she's worked here, and she'd be lying if she said she wasn't at least a tiny bit proud. James, however, is anything but. He's gone completely speechless, which is another first since Matty's been here, though it doesn't seem like it's going to last very long. Before he can yell something back, though, Jack's voice cuts through from the other end.

"I have someone, actually, that's why we're calling you."

Matty gets a strange feeling, something like deja-vu. There's something that feels almost familiar about this, like she could've predicted that he did.

"Someone is going to have to go get her, though," Jack finishes, and the feeling intesifies.

"Well if you're in such serious trouble that one of my _agents_," James says, practically spitting out the word, "is _swearing at me_ on the phone, I'm sure arranging transport for an asset won't be an issue."

"That's not quite what I meant." Jack sounds nervous, and it's an odd quality on him. "Someone has to go get her as in they need to go spring her from prison. She's in prison."

And it clicks. Matty knows exactly what name he's going to say a split second before he says it.

"Riley. Her name is Riley Davis."


	10. Almost Every Door's An Exit

oh y'all i'm so nervous about this one. i haven't written riley yet in this au and in writing her entrance, i kept and scrapped and redid so many different pieces of her introduction from canon that i have no idea how it turned out. anyhow, i hope you liked it, thank you again for your continued support and love! [heart emoji]

* * *

As soon as it connected for her that Jack was about to ask to bring Riley Davis onboard, Matty understood that the favor he'd been asking her hadn't just been tracking down the Director for him. It's clear right there on his face that, from the moment the word 'prison' exits Jack's mouth, James is in no way on board. Matty notices this and quickly switches off speaker, pulling the phone back up to her ear.

"I'm gonna call you back in a minute," she says, and hangs up without waiting for an answer.

"Absolutely not," James tells her even as she's hitting the button to end the call. His voice is hard and incredulous and while Matty has to admit that, this time, can see where he's coming from with the instant denial, she doesn't think they have a lot of options, and dismissing one outright is not a productive strategy right now. "We just, literally _just_ finished cleaning up from the last time criminals got involved in this agency, we are not bringing one in here on _purpose_, is Dalton insane? Is the man you convinced me to hire to be my son's partner actually _insane_, Webber?"

_Well, I mean, sometimes I wonder,_ she thinks, but doesn't dare make the joke out loud. "No, and it's not remotely the same thing."

"Please," he says, voice short and breathless with irritation, "please, I'm asking you, explain to me how different it could possibly be."

"We know already exactly what she was convicted of, and we'll be able to keep a close eye on her." Matty doesn't bother trying to convince him of Riley's integrity despite where she's currently being housed. It would be worthless in the context - James does not care if she's a good person or not. He cares about whether she's going to interfere with his agency. Anything personal about her is irrelevant. She could be history's greatest monster, but if she got in, did the job asked of her, and got out without screwing up or making a mockery of his agency and his leadership, James wouldn't care. A greater proponent of any ends justifying his means, Matty has never met. "We're out of other options. You and I both know we can't allow Rasmussen's program to go active, and neither of them are competent enough with computers to stop it. Not a lot of people are, and she's one of them."

She can see that she's starting to make an impact, the corner of James' mouth twitching. But then he frowns, and raises another point.

"Not a lot of people are, but we probably employ a good quarter of them. How can we possibly be out of other options. What happened to the three people we still have on staff, the ones who were team assigned? It was, uh, Natalie something, and like, Andy?"

"Natalie, Amos, and Cristina," Matty fills in. Jack had already told her about this part on her way over to James' office. "They're all on assignment, can't be reached."

"I thought the man- Amos, I thought he was still on call?"

Matty does not have a good feeling about the fact that there are three, _three_ major assets they have left in their IT department after the infiltration was cleared up and James did not know where all three of them were at the time of sending out his top team on a heavily tech-based mission. It seems odd, even for him, to have dispatched an asset as important Amos Bright on a mission and forgotten.

"You sent him out with the team in Moscow, remember?"

"No, of course I didn't." Just as Matty's about to argue, to point out that they can call the field team if he wanted proof, but the man in question is absolutely in Russia right now, James continues. "I don't dispatch IT assets. That's the job of the head of IT, that's what he gets paid for. To manage his department. Guess he just didn't tell me when he did it." There's a sour look on James' face, and the explanation clicks. It if weren't for the situation it's put them in, Matty would feel bad for the earful she's sure the head of IT is going to get after this.

However, they are still in that situation, which as it stands is up a creek without a paddle or a computer geek to get them out.

"It's one job," Matty reminds him, changing course back to Riley. "It's just one mission, one short mission. I will escort her out there and back myself just to be sure nothing untoward happens, I won't take my eyes off of her for a moment. Just… Trust Jack's word on this one, and if you won't trust his, then trust mine. I know what kind of hacker she is, and what she's capable of. Riley is our best option, and as we've just established, right now she is our only option."

For a long, tense moment, James is silent, looking at her with a hard set jaw. He's still got an expression on like he's bitten into a slice of lemon.

"Fine," he grinds out eventually. "Because we've got no other choice. But you watch her. Don't take your eyes off her for a _second._"

"Yes, sir," Matty says, relief flooding her like a physical sensation. She doesn't wait for any more of a conversation, already redialing Jack as she lets the door of James' office swing shut behind her. Once the phone call is made, updating Jack and Mac on what's been decided, she goes straight from the building to the car. There's no time to waste. She has a prison to get to.

This is not the first time Matty will be meeting with Riley Davis. She sits in the back seat of the company contracted car as it drives the winding road from the airport a short flight from DXS towards the prison where the woman she's here to retrieve is housed, absently staring at the back of the driver's nondescript head while she goes over what she knows. Matty knows a thing or two about the history between Jack and Riley, what little he'd told her. But she'd also met Riley in her own right, a meeting she's not a hundred percent sure Jack was actually aware of.

Shortly after Riley was convicted and her sentence began, Matty had been chasing a hacker for the job she'd held before this one. He was a bad one, the man she was after, responsible for a lot of security protocols used by criminals on the dark web looking to host depraved material without being traceable by those who'd want to stop them, among other things. In the course of her investigation, she'd come across a young woman who was tangentially connected to their hacker in a way that could be useful.

As soon as she'd heard what the man they were after was being accused of, Riley had readily agreed to meet with Matty and tell her whatever it was she knew. It hadn't been a lot, but it had led to a direct contact of his, and then to his arrest and the decryption of his code. Thought it hadn't been necessary for their investigation or the trial, Matty had gone back to visit Riley after they'd caught him, and told her how what she'd said had led them to being able to catch him and stop his talent from protecting anyone else committing heinous crimes using the internet.

Riley had seemed surprised by this, but appreciated the extra effort put in to tell her how it had all ended, and they'd parted on neutral, leaning towards positive, terms. She was obviously an angry, troubled young woman with a lot going on in her life and in her head, but Matty knew that, beyond whatever she'd been charged with, she was good. If she knew what they needed from her, it's almost a sure bet that Riley will agree to help. Especially if she knows she'll be getting out of lockup to do so. Matty likes to think the credibility and rapport she's built up will help ease the process along somewhat.

They pull up outside the dingy, depressing building housing maximum security federal inmates, and Matty instructs the driver to wait for her in the parking lot until she comes back, with or without Riley. Hopefully with, if all goes well. She walks in and bypasses the fact that she isn't on any visitor's lists with a couple of quick checks on her identity and a badge she produces for the bored-looking guard on desk duty. Matty is led quickly back to one of the rooms usually reserved for confidential meetings between inmates and their legal representation, where she is instructed to wait while they retrieve the person she's here to see.

When Riley walks through the door, orange jumpsuit glaring brightly and hair falling out of its bun down over her shoulders, she doesn't look pleased to see Matty. She looks suspicious, an undercurrent of anger behind it, and Matty doesn't let it phase her. Prison is not an easy place to be, and it's easier of you put a mean face on from the jump. People tend to assume you less easy to manipulate, that way.

"Riley," she says when the girl enters, standing up. "It's a pleasure to see you again. Excuse me, ma'am." The last bit was directed towards the guard who had escorted her in. "Can you remove those, please? I'd like to have a conversation on equal footing here."

The guard, if not aware of exactly who she is, then at least having been intently instructed by her boss to comply with pretty much anything Matty asked her to do, does as she is told, and removes the cuffs from around Riley's wrists. She steps back towards the door when she's done so, but shows no intent on leaving, and Matty can't really have that either.

"On equal footing and in privacy, if you wouldn't mind."

It's an order disguised as a request. Matty's gotten good at those. Walk softly and carry a big stick - words to live by, if you ask her. She smiles politely and waits for the expected compliance with an air that implies that there is no other choice but to do so.

The guard does as she's bid, and when the door closes behind her and the two of them are left alone, Matty turns to face Riley, who's taken the open seat across the dingy, scratched metal table. She's slouched back in her chair, frowning across at Matty with her arms folded over her chest. Her jaw is set in a hard line, and Matty feels like she's being catalogued and evaluated. The gaze prickles over her skin like something physical, and she straightens her back and clears her throat to dispel the feeling.

"So, Riley," she says, keeping her voice light and upbeat, like this is a conversation between old friends rather than a strange job proposal between tentatively friendly acquaintances who'd met under strained circumstances, "how are you?"

Riley raises one eyebrow. "Please, take a look at where we are right now and go ahead and answer that for yourself."

"Okay," Matty concedes, dropping the faux-levity and letting her voice fall to the serious register she'd been using to discuss the matter with James. She probably should've known better than to try and start this meeting with meaningless smalltalk. "That's a fair point. I at least hope you've been as well as possible since the last time we met-"

"Listen," interrupts the young woman across from her, sitting forward in her chair and shoving hair that's fallen across her face back behind an ear. "You asked for my help once, Matty, and I helped you. I'm proud of having done that and I'd do it again. But I don't want to sit here and listen to you make small talk about how I'm doing or what the weather is like outside - you pulled me out of yard time, by the way, and I only get an hour of that a day - so if you don't mind can you get to the point, please?"

Matty studies her for a moment. There's always been something about Riley, in their limited interactions before, that's seemed sharp. In the sense of her intelligence of course, but in another way as well. Like she'd ground her soft edges down until all that was left was hard, angry lines, designed to warn anyone thinking to try something that they'd be likely to hurt themselves in the effort.

"I'm here because I need your help again," Matty says. She doesn't let herself cringe or look away or betray any embarrassment or recalcitrance over her reason for approaching Riley again. "It's a bigger ask than last time, it's harder, and it's much more dangerous. But it's important - at least as important as it was when we were last sitting here. And we don't have much time to deal with it, so unfortunately, I can't give you any time to consider. I need to know now."

"What's the problem?" There's something else in Riley's face now, a spark in her eyes that ignited when Matty said 'bigger, harder, more dangerous'. Though she's suspicious and irritated and a miasma of other things, she's also a little excited. It's something that reminds her of Mac, the way she's coming alive at the thought of a challenge.

"We've got a hacker on our hands, and not your kind. He's nowhere near white hat. This man is bad news, and he's built a program that, if it isn't stopped, is going to destroy lives. I'm talking governmental infrastructural instability on an international scale. With the world we live in now, if the systems he's built this worm to destroy go under, a lot of people are going to suffer, and it's going to take years to climb back out of the crater it's going to blow in the region. Best case scenario, local governments are caught in a bureaucratic snarl they may never climb out of, and are knocked back several decades in systems and communications. Worst case scenario, we have mass destabilization that devolves into mass casualties."

"Sounds like bad news."

"It's very bad news, or at least it will be if we don't stop it before it happens. Which is where you come in. Our team on the ground has already apprehended the hacker who wrote the code, but neither of them have the skill or training in this area to even attempt to stop the program itself. So I'm here to ask you to come with me to Brazil and shut this thing down before it has the chance to deploy. We're on a tight clock and if you'll help us, we need to leave now."

Whatever resistance Matty had been expecting, it doesn't come. Riley is already nodding half way through her explanation, and as soon as she finishes speaking, she's got her answer.

"Alright. I'll do it. Let's go."

It would be so easy to accept the win as it was and go from there, deal with the consequences when they reached Rio and Riley saw who was waiting for them. Matty had walked in here prepared for a fight and hadn't gotten one, and comparing that to the general level of obstinate difficulty she's presently dealing with in her every day life, it is extremely tempting to not provoke an argument where she hadn't gotten one. But she knows that having this conversation now will make it faster and less likely to torch the whole plan than if she springs it on Riley once they've already flown to another continent. It has to happen now.

Besides, the thought doesn't sit well with her morally. Never let it be said that Matty is above a little benevolent lying or concealment here and there, when it serves a higher purpose, but it would feel like too much a lie for not enough a reason, if she were to keep this from Riley now.

"There's something else you should know, before we leave. About my team on the ground, and why I came to you first." Riley looks suspicious, and Matty supposes that's fair. She continues, trying not to sound as hesitant and nervous about this as she feels. "I didn't just come here because I remembered you from the last time you helped me, though that didn't hurt. It was suggested to me that I come to you by a colleague at the new organization I work for, one of our team on site." _Rip the bandaid. Just rip the bandaid._ "Jack Dalton."

The process Riley's brain goes through on hearing the name is jarring and visible across her face as it happens. She cycles through confused and angry and a grab bag of other things before saying, "There's no way one of your ground team is a tile salesman."

"No, he's not," Matty confirms, mentally directing towards Jack, _Tile? A tile salesman? Was that really the best you could do?_

"Whatever he is, I'm not working with him. I'll help you, but I won't help him."

Ah. There's the fight Matty had been expecting. And, much as she'd be ready to send Jack off somewhere essentially on time-out else for basically any halfway-decent reason, she can't. She needs him there and, more to the point, Mac needs him there.

"Unfortunately, for all that I would love to send Jack home while you dealt with the technological aspect of our problem, I can't. His partner is there on site as well, and Jack's primary function is protecting his partner, whose skillset far more resembles yours than it does his. Jack was CIA when you met him, and now he's-"

"DXS, like you."

If Matty hadn't lost the ability to be surprised since joining that self-same organization, she'd ask how it was Riley knew that. As it stands, she nods. "Yes. And regardless of whatever mistakes he made when he knew you, and trust me, I know what a great big buffoon the man can be sometimes, he's a good agent and a good man, and he's not going to leave his partner there alone. And if this goes badly, we're going to need him there. I guess what you need to decide now is if however much you hate Jack is stronger than however much you want to help people.

Silence. Silence, for a long, stiff moment. Matty doesn't realize she's holding her breath until Riley breaks the silence and she releases it with a soft whoosh.

"If I do this," Riley says, voice loud and acidic. She points at Matty, jabbing with one finger. "_If_ I do this, if I come with you and work with _him,_ then I do not come back here. Got it? Whatever you've gotta do, favors you gotta call in, strings you gotta pull, I leave this building with you now and I don't come back. Do we have a deal?"

It's not worth mentioning at that point that Matty was never planning to send her back to prison after this to begin with, so she just nods. "We have a deal."

Riley nods and begins to stand, but something stops her as she's halfway out of her seat. She sits back down and crosses her arms, narrowing her eyes at Matty. Though, this time, she looks more confused than antagonistic, like she's done the math and there's something that's just not quite adding up.

"I have one more question," she says. Matty gestures out with a hand, a wordless invitation to ask it. "Why are you in any way comfortable asking me this? I'm a criminal. You know what sort of things I've done- Well, some of them anyway. You could probably find another hacker, one you wouldn't have to break out of prison, if you really tried, called in some favors, but you're here instead. How do you know you can trust me?"

It is, all things considered, a fair question, and its asking serves to further convince Matty that she's making the right call, here. Most people would take the opportunity and not risk talking the person about to spring them from federal prison out of doing that.

"You're guilty of the crime that put you here." It's not a question, but a statement of fact. Matty knows this to be true - she'd done some poking around after their last interaction, wanting to get her out if there was anything she could do to make this happen.

"I am," Riley agrees. Her face is guileless and open and dares Matty to say something more about it. Say something more about it she does, but probably not in the way Riley had been expecting.

"Knowing what you know now," Matty says, voice slow and careful, "about what the consequences would be, what would happen to you because you did it, would you do it again?"

"Yes." There isn't a second of hesitation, a moment's consideration, before she gets the answer. "It was what was right. I didn't have any other choice."

Matty likes to think she's fairly good at reading people. And when they'd met before, the person she'd met had been a bright, principled girl who had made a choice and lived with the fallout with her chin held high and her gaze daring anybody to tell her she should be ashamed of it. A handful of infractions in her time in supermax, none of them violent, didn't really give Matty much pause for the offer she was about to make next, nor the conviction that landed her here to begin with. The last of her own reservations were hinged entirely on Riley's answer to that one question - _Would you do it again?_

"Then that's all I need to know."


	11. I Never Wanted To Say Goodbye

so THAT took me way longer than i wanted. can you guess i went to a wedding and then ran smack into our first quiz week in my post-grad program. BIG YIKES. anyway. thanks for sticking around and i hope i navigated this chapter okay. things are a little different and it was odd to approach this reunion from the inside of someone's head - we didn't have anything of what they were THINKING when riley and jack saw each other again. anyways. please enjoy, and let me know what you're thinking! the pieces are all coming together...

(also, we're just gonna all agree to pretend that the timeline on this makes sense okay? thank you. i made a few miscalculations.)

* * *

It's a hot day in Rio de Janeiro, and the odd shack where Rasmussen had elected to set up shop is not especially well air conditioned – which is to say, not air conditioned at all. Jack isn't feeling too great, restless in the heat and the stagnant situation he and Mac find themselves in, unable to do anything until Matty arrives with Riley. He still can't believe she was able to convince James to let them bring the girl in – he'd been sure it was a no-go from the beginning, but it was a chance he had to throw out there. If there was even the faintest hope that the Director would go for it, she seemed like their best option to pull through with a success on this mission.

If Jack is antsy, though, that's nothing compared to how Mac is fairing at the moment. He's taken to pacing the length of the run down building, fingers tapping an erratic beat against his thigh, and every time he reaches the far wall, he stops, looking around and muttering silently to himself, mouth moving around quick little words Jack can't for the life of him make out. It's honestly headache inducing to watch, the way he just can't seem to still. Mac is a perpetual motion machine on a desk that someone set off and then left the room, abandoning his nerves to clack loudly against each other, jarring and abrupt and never ceasing.

"She's gonna be here soon," Jack says from the desk at the chair where he'd deposited himself after fifteen minutes watching Mac wear a hole in the old floor. "Matty is gonna be here soon with Riley in tow and we're gonna be out of here so fast you won't hardly believe it, I'm telling you."

The sound of Mac's footsteps still into silence on the percussive floor and Jack watches him with concerned eyes as he stops next to a random, unadorned patch of wall. It's unclear if it's something Jack said or a thought that's darted, like his thoughts generally seem to, a hundred and thirty miles an hour through Mac's brain, that's stopped him. The answer makes itself known after a few moments when the kid speaks, almost too quietly for Jack to hear him.

"I shouldn't have yelled at him." Mac's index finger is scraping lightly over the cracked wall and his eyes are focused somewhere behind Jack's head. "I'm gonna hear about that in review tonight, I know there's gonna be one."

This is not the first time Jack has heard Mac offhandedly mention 'review'. As far as he can tell, it sounds like some kind of addendum to an after-action, a meeting to reflect on the events of a mission, what was done and why and how it could've gone differently, for better or worse. It sounds like a useful tool, if done right, though Jack isn't quite sure that, given his experiences thus far, he really trusts how James goes about it to be particularly productive.

He doesn't know exactly what happens in one of those meetings, as he has yet to be called in for one himself. Given the general turnover and the specific brevity of the employment of Mac's partners before him, Jack can see why. Why bother, really, if he's not likely to last six months, investing in his development? Now that his tenure has lasted for longer than it would seem anyone was expecting it to, Jack is sure his number will come up soon, and he'll get a look at this 'review' process up close and personal.

In the meantime, it isn't helping anything or anyone, least of all Mac himself, that he seems to have locked onto something new to panic about.

"I'm sure it'll be fine," Jack says, trying to sound reassuringly blasé. "Shit happens, y'know, can't be the first time anyone's ever yelled at the guy on a stressful mission."

"It was unprofessional," Mac mutters, and Jack scoffs quietly.

"The Director got on you about the state of your _hair_ during a briefing today, kid, _that_ was unprofessional."

"He's got high standards."

"Right." _Especially when it comes to you_, Jack adds silently.

It doesn't seem to have helped. If anything, their little exchange has made Mac more nervous, though he doesn't resume the pacing he'd been doing before. Instead he leans against the wall, chewing on his lower lip and frowning at nothing identifiable as far as Jack can tell. It's a situation Jack does not enjoy finding himself in. Not their general circumstances, though those were obviously fairly unpleasant on a number of levels, but specifically knowing that Mac is having such a bad time it's plainly visible on his face and having absolutely nothing he can do about it.

Jack helps. It's an intrinsic component of his personality that's been present in him since he was a child. He remembers his mother looking at him with glowing, mirth-filled eyes and calling him 'my little assistant' when he got covered in flour up to his elbows trying to lend a hand making biscuits, he remembers countless nights sitting up with his younger sister and the math homework that had been known to frustrate her to tears, spinning around the living room with his older sister for hours when she had her first high school dance. It's a part of him, as much as his eye color and his accent are, and it had only been reinforced through his time with EOD, being intrusted with the greatest weight a person can be – someone else's life.

Months on end spent driving around a sand-filled warzone with a bright young person trained in his sights, knowing that he was frequently the only thing that stood between some prodigy of a bomb tech and a premature, violent death served to intensify the existing feelings of stewardship Jack often felt for those around him, and he's felt it around Mac, too. From day one, he'd known more strongly than he knew just about anything else that no matter what, Mac's life was his number one priority. Somewhere along the line, Mac's life had expanded from just his continued ability to keep living to include his general state as well – physical _and_ emotional. His partner, his young, reckless, beyond-intelligent and beyond-wary partner, is in acute distress at the moment, and Jack doesn't know what to do about it. But he can't just do nothing, so with cracking knees and a hesitation that almost holds him there, he rises from his chair and takes a hesitant step over towards where Mac stands by the wall.

"It's gonna be fine," he says, keeping his voice steady and quiet, while reaching out with one hand. It's barely landed on the back of Mac's shoulder nearest to him when Jack realizes his mistake.

The kid's entire body has seized up under his palm, and he's stopped breathing completely at the unexpected touch. It takes a few moments for it to stutter into starting again, and Jack tries to be casual about the odd flinch, not wanting to draw attention to the highly disproportionate response to a friendly hand on the shoulder, and gives it a pause before dropping the contact and stepping back. Mac's cheeks have gone slightly pink, and he won't look Jack in the eye, obviously embarrassed by what's just happened. It reminds him, in a way, of the briefing that morning, how Mac had refused to look at him basically the entire time, especially during the odd almost-argument when he'd accidentally referred to the Director as 'dad'.

"It's gonna be fine," Jack repeats like nothing had happened. He's made the split second decision not to acknowledge it, and he hopes it was the right call. "Matty is gonna bring Riley and we're gonna stop this cyber-bomb thing, whatever it is, and then we're gonna go home and everything's gonna keep going like normal, okay? You'll have your review, and it might suck, but it won't be the end of the world."

The corner of Mac's mouth twitches a little.

"Yeah," he says, voice stiff and a little odd. "You're right. Not the end of the world."

Jack is left with the odd, formless suspicion that he's somehow said the wrong thing, put his foot in it without any idea what 'it' was. Silence extends between them, awkward and arid and Jack doesn't know if he should say something or leave it be. Luckily, Mac makes the decision for him, though it doesn't do much to alleviate the awkward tension.

"So, wait, how is it you know this hacker, exactly, the one Matty's flying down here with?"

"Riley," Jack supplies, and goes to sit back down. His temples throb in an abrupt headache, setting on quick and hard, beating at the inside of his skull. He snags a bottle of water out of his bag and cracks off the cap, taking a swig. If he's lucky, it's a dehydration headache. If he's not lucky - and historically, Jack is a lot of things but lucky is not one of them - the headache has just begun. "She's… She was…" Simple and easy is probably the best bet. "Riley is my ex's daughter."

Mac's eyebrows about hit his hairline.

"I can't tell you what I thought you were going to say, but it definitely wasn't that." There's a hint of humor in the words, and when Jack looks over at him, Mac's smiling faintly. "How long has it been?"

"Long time," Jack answers shortly. He knows he has to be careful about this, about how to handle things when Riley gets here, what to say and not to say to Mac before that happens. Not just because of Riley herself, either. He already knows things there are about as screwed up as they could be, and he only hopes she's willing to look past her anger long enough to help them stop this e-bomb or whatever it is. Things with Mac, though… Things there are finally starting to feel a little easier, like he's summited the cliff and from here on out it's tough terrain but at least it's downhill. There's a good chance, though, that depending on how the next day goes, things might get frosty.

It doesn't escape Jack's attention, the fact that there is something deeply not right about the relationship between Mac and James. He's not exactly sure what, or how deep it goes, but something is wrong there, and Jack is keeping a microscope eye on it until he knows how much trouble Mac is in with his dad. This knowledge, that Mac might be in some unidentified, uncertain danger at home as well as in the field, means that Jack knows this situation with Riley and him? It has the potential to blow his partnership sky high.

If Mac asks more questions, about what happened and why Riley is so angry, the answers might drive him further away if Jack isn't careful. Then again, whatever he's likely to be drumming up inside his head is bound to be worse. Left between a rock and a hard place, Jack chooses the hard place, and keeps talking. He explains what had happened the night he got into that fight with Elwood, the one that was really the beginning of the end, how he was sure that had been the last straw for Riley, who'd never seemed to want him there to begin with. He left because he wanted to avoid making a hard thing even harder, for any of them, and it was just about the most difficult thing he'd ever had to do.

The explanation goes over about as well as he could've expected it too. There's a look on Mac's face like he doesn't entirely believe he's gotten the whole story, but neither does he push for it, nodding and accepting what Jack's told him. Taking a deep breath, Jack decides to take one more chance.

"I've missed her every day since," he says, and his heart gives an odd little off-beat pulse, squeezing hard and painful at the admission. He figures that piece of honesty wins him some amount of points at least, because Mac's weird expression has gone from suspicious to curious, and isn't anywhere near hostile. Jack'll take it. He only hopes things go as well with Riley.

Riley, who he hasn't spoken to since she was a child. Jack is anxious about seeing her again. He's kept tabs on her from afar, as unobtrusively as possible, hearing every now and then from Diane, who he'd tried as much as possible to end on good terms with. Aside from a few pictures here and there, he hasn't seen her, and he wonders what she looks like now, if she takes after her mother as strongly now as she had when she was little. It was less in the actual features of her face, though there was a resemblance there, and more in this look she got in her eye sometimes, when she felt she wasn't being listened to, or someone was trying to do something she thought was very stupid. Riley had been stubborn then, with a righteous streak a mile wide and just as deep, and Jack figures not much has changed there, given he's read her file. Well. Read what was left of her file after the black markers got at it.

It's not at all clear what she's going to think of him, how she's going to react to seeing him again in person. Jack wonders, absently flicking at a wrapper on the desk next to his hand, watching it flutter to the floor in a windmill of glittering silver and red, if she's still as angry as she'd been once upon a time, back when everything was a kind of complicated he had no experience with. If she is, he thinks, she's got a right to be. He just hopes he might be able to make at least some kind of amends, on this brief opportunity he's been handed to try and start fresh with her. There's a part of him that's guiltily thankful that he wasn't the one who had to go to the prison to get her himself, that Matty had taken care of that initial 'remember the man who picked you up from school and made you soup when you were sick and left when he screwed up with your real dad so bad you'd never be able to forgive him, he's not at all who he said he was' conversation. It wasn't fair of him to put that on her, but really, neither of them had much of a choice.

Hours pass uneventfully, with a strain of high-strung anticipation humming in the air. Jack catches a few hours of sleep, sitting upright in the chair by the desk, and directs his partner to do the same with a debatable degree of success. Mac at least spends maybe three hours with his head back and his eyes closed, breathing deep, and though Jack suspects he'd slept barely if at all, he'll still take it. It's better than nothing. Night cools the air somewhat, and Jack steps out for a bit, breathing deeply and looking up at the scattered stars. It's clear the constellations are different here than back home, either Los Angeles or Texas, but he's not quite good enough at celestial navigation to tell exactly how. Mac might know, and Jack half entertains the idea of dragging him out here to find out. He's in the chair, eyes closed, at least pretending to be asleep at the moment, though, so Jack resigns himself to being curious and tries to employ a deep breathing exercise while he watches the unfamiliar night sky.

The first sign of Riley's arrival the next morning comes in the sound of an engine hauling an exhausted car up the steep road to Rasmussen's shack-house. Jack gets up and walks outside, followed closely by Mac. He stands there leaning against the doorframe and tries not to look as anxious as he feels when the car pulls up and an officer of the Policia Federal gets out, opening the door behind her to allow Matty and Riley to exit. The first look Jack gets at Riley is over the top of the car when her head comes into view. Her hair is grown out long and held up in a bun only barely achieving its goal, and she's wearing sunglasses that obscure most of the top half of her face. Matty rounds the back of the car, walking over to them and barely snagging Jack's attention away from Riley for a moment before he looks back.

"Gentlemen," Matty says in what Jack suspects is an at least half-sarcastic greeting. "I see you managed not to burn the place down waiting for us."

"Barely," Jack jokes back, but his heart isn't in it. He's still watching Riley, who has now followed behind Matty to stand next to her, arms folded and staring straight back at him. Her jaw is set in a hard line, and she's taken the sunglasses off now, folded up and tucked into her shirt. Despite the distance, he can see her eyes boring into him, and he fights to keep the cringe tamped down.

"Well, Jack?" she says eventually, after a long silence has elapsed between the four of them, and Jack nearly chokes up. She sounds like an adult - which makes sense, he supposes she is one - and it takes him by surprise. He doesn't know what he was expecting, obviously she wasn't going to sound twelve anymore, but hearing it out loud is different than knowing it was coming. "Don't you have something you'd like to say to me?"

_I'm sorry,_ jumps into his mouth immediately, and Jack swallows it down. This is the wrong time and place for that conversation, and he can't begin to figure out how to approach it, so he instead grins in a way he hopes doesn't seem unnatural or dismissive, and says, "Hi, Riley."

Before the thunderclouds on her face can manifest into a storm Jack would be well deserving of the wrath of, the last person Jack would expect to jump into the middle of this extremely uncomfortable reunion speaks up.

"Good to meet you," says Mac, physically stepping into the space separating he and Jack from Matty and Riley. "I'm Mac. I'm glad you're here and I appreciate you coming all this way to help us out."

With this introduction, Mac has swiftly and successfully shifted the focus of the conversation onto himself and, more importantly, the job they're all here to accomplish, diffusing a lot of the tension and redirecting the energy of the encounter. It has an instant effect on Riley, who looks away from Jack and at him, gaze no longer accusatory but evaluating.

"Hi, Mac," she says. "Riley. Where's the computer?"

She follows him inside, leaving Matty and Jack alone outside for a moment.

"Thank you," Jack says to her, and Matty raises an eyebrow.

"Doing my job, Dalton."

They're both well aware he didn't just mean going to get Riley and escorting her here. Inside the shack, Riley is settling into the vacant chair at Rasmussen's desk, hitting a few keys on the keyboard and making a surprised and impressed sound in the back of her throat at what she sees.

"Wow," she says out loud, looking over at Mac, who is standing next to her, watching what she's doing with interest. "No shit you guys needed me. This is serious business, your guy was incredible. Obviously a terrible person, but an incredible coder."

"Are you good enough to get past him?" The question is blunt, and Jack winces, wishing Mac had exercised at least a fraction more tact, though the question is a fair one. Of the three of them, he was the one least familiar with Riley and what she was capable of, with no frame of reference to work from.

"Please," she snorts. "I'm gonna hack circles around this dude, give me an hour and we'll be in the clear." It would be an irresponsibly arrogant claim if Jack wasn't well aware she had the chops to back it up.

"I hope so," Mac says, "because we've only got about ninety minutes left to find out."


	12. The King's A Clown

later than i wanted and without a moodboard/edit thing to put up on tumblr yet, but it's here! boy howdy it's here.

thanks again as always, and enjoy!

* * *

There are very few things that Jack enjoys more in life than watching a person do something they're really, unbelievably good at. It's hard to describe, the way their faces change, their eyes come alive and they seem like for a moment they've lost that ever-present fear everyone carries that someone, somewhere is watching what they're doing and finding them dissatisfactory. It's one of his favorite things about working with Mac. For someone who is so anxious so much of the time, constantly hyper-aware that he is in fact probably being evaluated, it's like none of it matters any more when he's faced with a problem and has the answer in his hands. It's incredible.

Jack has never seen Riley work before. It's deeply impressive and a little frightening, the speed with which her brain processes the information in front of her and directs her hands to carry out the solution she's identified for whatever problem she's discovered. There's a small notebook Mac had produced from somewhere, open next to the keyboard, and Riley scribbles something in it every so often, using it to sort out some complicated piece of what is the electronic equivalent of tangled yarn. For all she seemed to be absolutely furious when she'd seen him, whatever she was feeling about Jack has been shoved quickly to the back-burner. She hasn't looked back at him once.

Mac hadn't either. The entire time Riley worked, demonstrating before Jack's eyes the expertise he'd logically known she had but never quite grasped the extent of, Mac was riveted. The two of them are sat at the desk together, Riley on Rasmussen's ratty old swivel chair, Mac on a stepladder he'd pulled over from somewhere else in the building. Mac's elbows are propped on the edge of the surface, knocking an empty 5 Hour Energy bottle onto the floor in the process, and he's looking from the screen, to Riley, down to her notes on the paper beside her, back to the screen. He's asking questions, too, smart questions that Jack wouldn't have known to ask, and Jack is struck for a moment with the thought that putting the two of them in the same room was either going to be the best or the worst idea he's ever had. They could build a kingdom or tear one down when they put their heads together, he's sure of it.

Seeing Riley work, and Mac sitting with her watching what she was doing, Jack almost forgets that someone else is there with him. Matty clears her throat after a while. It doesn't distract Mac or Riley at all, but it gets Jack's attention immediately. He looks to the side and sees her jerk her head at the front door in one quick nod. For a moment, he hesitates, not wanting to let either of them out of his sight - Riley because it's been so long he still can't hardly believe she's actually here and he's actually seeing her again, and Mac because in his experience thus far bad things tended to happen to the kid the second Jack takes his eyes off him, ever. The look on Matty's face is serious enough though, that he does so without too long a pause.

Jack shuts the door behind him softly so as not to disturb Mac and Riley, and turns to look at Matty. However hot it is inside the building, it's worse outside without the roof to shield them from the sun, though there's a light breeze that's kind of nice. At least the air isn't dead-still and smelling vaguely of evaporated energy drinks and stale Twix bars. Matty is standing by the side of the door, and he's immediately overcome once again with appreciation for the fact that she's here at all right now. That she'd gotten Riley here. That couldn't have been simple.

"Thank you," he says again, more seriously than he'd said it inside, where it had been an offhand mutter. Something about the way he says it must convey to her that he actually means this, as more than just a polite formality between coworkers and friends who were just, as she'd said, doing their jobs, because she doesn't dismiss it.

"What for?" she asks, and he shrugs.

"For whatever you said to her that made her forget hating me enough to show up here."

Matty shrugs, looking out over the horizon of buildings, the ocean in the distance. "She's a good person. Didn't need that much convincing, once she understood what was going on." There's a brief pause, and then she looks at him. Something in the air between them feels different in the moments separating those words and the ones that come next. "Listen, Jack, something weird happened back in Los Angeles."

"What kind of weird?" Jack asks, guard instantly raised.

He glances back out of habit, looking through the window into the haphazard hideout. There had been newspaper taped over it when they got there, but they'd pulled it down to allow some natural light in, and he can see now to the desk, where Mac and Riley are still sitting together. Riley is still working, fingers flying over the keyboard, and Mac is still watching her. His own hands are moving on the desk now, and Jack is worried for a second that maybe they'd found some kind of actual bomb as well as a cyber-bomb or whatever. After squinting hard, though, he identifies that what Mac is doing isn't anything to do with any kind of threat. He's just twisting discarded foil wrappers into some kind of abstract shapes, and Jack's shoulders relax a fraction.

It had been pure instinct, hearing 'something weird happened' with that serious voice, and needing to immediately put eyes on his partner, verify he's still in one piece. Now that he's sure the kid's okay, Jack feels a little silly, but he can't bring himself to regret it. Mac is okay, and he can breathe a fraction easier. Until Matty tells him what's gone wrong this time, at least.

"The kind of weird," Matty says, in a remarkably calm and reasonable tone given their present circumstances, "where the Director of DXS didn't know the on-call analyst had been dispatched to Moscow before he sent his top team out on a very sensitive, technologically focused mission to Brazil. That's what kind of weird."

"I…" Jack blinks hard, shaking his head. "What? Sorry, he didn't know what?"

"Amos Bright," Matty explains, "the on-call analyst you were supposed to be able to call, he was dispatched by the head of IT on an assignment to Moscow. With the other two analysts who could've handled this assignment already on jobs, I believe they're in Helsinki and Abidjan at the moment, he was on-site at DXS to be the on-call senior analyst in case a dispatched team needed help. Well, a dispatched team needed help. In Russia."

"And the Director just… Didn't know?" It's very hard for Jack to wrap his brain around what's going on right now, how the Director of their agency could possibly not know where an asset that important was when there was an operation of this importance happening with this heavy a computer aspect. They were dealing with a _cyberterrorist_. And James hadn't known they didn't have a computer analyst available. It's incomprehensible to Jack.

"He said that he didn't know because it wasn't his job to know." The look on Matty's face makes it pretty clear how she feels about _that_ concept, and Jack has to agree. He can't hardly believe what he's hearing. "He told me the head of IT was in charge of dispatching IT assets, and the man must have just… Not told him about sending Bright to Moscow, leaving us without a single on-call senior analyst."

Jack shakes his head. He wants to say something, but no words are coming to mind, just an empty, shapeless disbelief that this could possibly be happening. That the Director could really be that careless.

"There's a serious problem with departments not talking to each other happening in DXS, I think," Matty says, saving him the trouble of having to figure it out. "It's not the first time I've seen or heard of this kind of thing, and nobody seems to understand exactly why this can't be happening. Why the Director of this agency can't be unaware of things like all senior analysts being off-site and unreachable, why he can't have his assistant communicating orders to the head of exfil and not reporting back about the fulfillment of them."

At the way Jack's eyebrows shoot up his forehead, Matty nods and smiles grimly.

"Yes, that's happened. There's communication breakdowns around every corner and I think it's because of what I asked you to help me investigate. The problem in DXS that's causing all of these issues on missions."

"Right, the mole the Director maybe didn't get the first time around," Jack says. At least that he understands and remembers. Something about the way her face changes when he says it, though, leaves him feeling somehow even less reassured than he'd already been throughout this conversation.

"The more I look into things," she tells him grimly, but straight to the point, "the more I think we were wrong before. I don't think the Director failed to see the problem. I think the Director is the problem."

Jack wishes that, when he heard this, he felt surprised. He wishes he could say that when he heard Matty essentially accuse the Director of DXS, his partner's father, of endangering missions and personnel through his behavior, he was shocked, incredulous, immediately dismissive of the possibility. But he isn't. Instead, all Jack feels is a sinking in his gut, like some terrible suspicion he's harbored for a long time has been anticlimactically and horribly confirmed. Matty thinks James is the problem. And in all the years he's known her, Jack has not seen Matty be wrong very often, especially not about a problem of this magnitude.

"Okay," he says. "Okay. What do we do now?"

"Proceed with the investigation as we were conducting it before."

It's a relief she actually has an answer, and Jack is reminded of why people like Matty are in charge and people like him are in the field. If he had to be the one troubleshooting this mess, picking apart the rubble of the organization he'd been dropped into to find what was salvageable and what was ash, Jack is sure he'd walk off the job before getting anywhere near this far.

"There's nothing much we can do yet," Matty continues, "not until we know the nature of what's going on with the Director. If it's life-threatening carelessness or if he's got some kind of agenda he's working towards, making the calls he does. No matter what, this all just got a lot more complicated and a lot more dangerous for both of us - our jobs at least, if not more than that. Do you still want to be involved? I won't hold it against you if you bow out now."

He respects her for the offer, made in good and genuine faith. If Jack were to take her up on it, recuse himself from assisting her investigation into the conduct of their boss - an endeavor that could very well end both of their careers if not worse - then no hard feelings would exist between them. Matty knows that Jack wouldn't breathe a word of her secret mission, just as Jack knows that Matty wouldn't think less of him or treat him any differently. And it's tempting, Jack can't deny that. He thinks of it seriously for a moment, of getting out now and not making his already complicated and hazardous life just that much more so. But something stops him.

Inside Rasmussen's badly constructed little shack house, Mac is talking to Riley. He's got an elbow propped against the surface of the crowded desk and he's gesturing with his other hand, which holds one of the twisted and folded foil candy wrappers. It's hard to see through the window, having been cleaned but obviously not recently, but Jack thinks it might be a fish of some kind, the little design Mac's made out of the garbage from Rasmussen's work station. He's riveted to what's happening on the screen, the magic Riley is working over their digital time-bomb, and his movement is animated. Gone is the anxiety of before, thrumming through his entire body, practically radiating off him in waves. Anxiety over not being able to complete a task he'd known from the start he wouldn't be able to complete because his superior, who happened to be his father, hadn't taken his concerns seriously. Anxiety over having yelled at the man when the ignoring of those concerns had landed them in the situation they were in that required springing their help from federal supermax.

If Jack walks away from this investigation now that Matty has identified a target, and it's Director MacGyver, then he has to walk away from DXS too. There's no way he could stay. He'd leave, and they'd find Mac a new partner, and he'd be the latest in a revolving door of partners, gone as soon as he'd arrived. And that's a thought that Jack admits, standing here on this dusty road alone outside with Matty, he can't stomach contemplating. He's made a lot of poor choices in his life and this isn't going to be one of them.

In for a penny, in for a pound, in for potentially taking his career by not only conducting an investigation under his boss's boss's nose, but an investigation into the man himself. In for maybe landing himself in prison if he's _really_ unlucky.

"I'm seeing this through," Jack tells Matty, tearing his eyes off the window and looking back to her. "No matter how it ends. Especially if it means his dad, malicious or not, on purpose or not, is going to end up getting him hurt."

Especially if the man already has.

Matty nods, and she doesn't say this is why she picked him to begin with, doesn't admit she'd been counting on his stubborn, dig your heels in, hell or high water, do this the right way or die trying nature from the start. Jack gets the feeling she's thinking it, though, and he respects the thought process behind it, the four-dimensional chess she's always been playing while the rest of them were locked in slow-moving bouts of checkers. If it were him, he'd have called her, same as she'd called him, and he's only slightly bothered at having been used like that. When one has assets, one uses them, that's just life. He's frankly honored, in a way, that she chose him.

"There's one more thing," Matty says before Jack can fully turn around and go back inside, a new level of duplicity making his life that much more winding a maze of what he can and can't say and who he can or can't say it to.

"What?" If Jack's voice comes out so cautious he doesn't sound like he wants the answer at all, well, it's probably because at this point he mostly doesn't. One major horrible breakthrough per day, thank you.

"Riley."

Every muscle in Jack's body tenses and his jaw grits so hard he's worried he might break a tooth.

"What about Riley," he grinds out, trying to sound normal and failing miserably.

"What do you say about the idea that we keep her on at DXS?"

Someday, Jack is going to stop trying to predict what's going to come out of Matty's mouth next, or at the very least stop being surprised when she says something fully out of left field.

"Keep her on at DXS," Jack repeats, not because he didn't understand it, but because he did and he can't possibly have heard her right.

"Yes." Except evidently he did, because Matty's response is immediate and dead serious. "Keep her on. She's incredible, look at her, we could use a mind like that. We're so desperately short-staffed right now, and your team specifically needs a dedicated technical analyst with the kind of jobs the Director is starting to send you on now that you're off your training wheels. But I wanted to run it past you first, given your… History. So, what do you think? Can you work with her? More to the point, do you think she can get over how she feels about you enough to work with you?"

"Yes to the first, I'm cautiously optimistic on the second." Jack actually means it, too. She's managed to get past it enough to help them out enough so far, though things might be different if this were a permanent position rather than a one-time field trip with an unfortunate chaperone. "The real problem I'm seeing with that idea is the Director. He didn't sound exactly excited on the phone, and that was _before_ you hung up to talk him down."

"Why don't you let me handle the Director," Matty says in the tone of a person who's well-versed in the art of managing difficult superiors. She's going to run her own agency, one day, and Jack hopes he's around to see it.

In the end, it takes Riley exactly seventy-one minutes from the moment she sits down in the chair to untangle and diffuse the mess of coding left behind in what Jack had taken to referring to, at least in his own head, as Rasmussen's cyber-bomb. She sits back at the desk, looking exhilarated and proud and like she's just had the time of her life. When she looks back at Jack and Matty, she doesn't even glare daggers at Jack telling her she's done a great job. She gives the briefest flash of a smile, before turning back to the computer and hitting a few more keys. The screen flickers and goes dark before pulling up a wall of scrolling green text.

"Do you have a hard drive?"

Jack blinks at the question, not having processed it by the time Mac is already nodding, leaning to the side to dig around in his messenger bag.

"Why do _you_ have a hard drive?" Jack asks, when he pulls it out and hands it to her. He glances over his shoulder and shrugs.

"Picked it up from IT on the way out. You never know."

"Actually," Riley puts in, plugging the thing into the side of the monitor, "you always know, and the answer is always 'yes, we're going to inevitably need an external hard drive, that is if we want any evidence of our big bad cyberterrorist's plans, current or future, so we know if he's got any nasty surprises out there somewhere'. So, if you don't mind, give me like, fifteen more minutes and we're gonna be good to go."

She takes her fifteen minutes with no protest from anyone else in the room. Matty uses the time to contact exfil, and give their retrieval team - Sierra November again, the same one that had come to get them from Siberia the day Matty first brought Jack into the investigation into conduct at DXS - a heads up that they would be transporting two more people than they'd planned on. Riley tucks the hard drive safely away in her bag, and then they're off, back into the car Matty and Riley had been brought in.

Matty sits up front with the taciturn officer from the Policia Federal while Jack, Mac, and Riley sit crammed awkwardly together in the back seat. Mac had wordlessly opted to sit between them, and Jack can feel his rigid discomfort from where their arms press together. The anxiety that had left him while watching Riley work seems to have returned, and Jack doesn't know if it's because he's crammed between two people, one he's hardly met and one he's hardly began to trust, or because his mind has drifted back to his post-mission review. Regardless of what it's about, Jack wishes he could do something to calm the kid's nerves, ease some of the tension causing slight tremors in his body, so minute Jack never would've noticed if he hadn't been paying attention. He's too restricted in his own movement, though, never mind being able to say anything with four other people within immediate earshot. So he does nothing at all, and hates the feeling for the entire drive.

Sierra November is waiting for them at the retrieval point, and it's the smiling face of Meredith Casey, the exfil agent who spoke Russian that was the reason they were dispatched for Siberia, that greets them.

"Hey there, guys," she says, as bright and chipper as Jack remembers her being last time. "Got transport here with your names on it, MacGyver and Dalton plus two. Y'all ready to head home?"

"Am I ever," Jack says, and can't help but glance over his shoulder at Riley when he says it. There's a funny look on her face, and he can't quite tell, years separating now from a time when he could read her like an open book, if it's because of the overall situation or the question itself.

Regardless, she says nothing and climbs up into the vehicle just like the rest of them do. Jack watches as she's drawn into animated small-talk with Mac, and the two of them keep up a near-constant chatter the entire trip back to Los Angeles. He gives Matty a raised-eyebrow look at one point, and sends her a surreptitious text message over the airplane's on-board network.

_Are you sure,_ it reads, _that we know what we're unleashing on the world, setting up the two of them to work together?_

Matty doesn't answer, and rolls her eyes at him from across the plane's aisle, but he can see the smile on her face. He's glad he was able to amuse her at least a little bit. She's been working double time, if she's kept up with her regular Deputy Director's duties on top of their little side project.

The trip home is uneventful, and what feels like far too soon, Jack finds himself standing outside the Director's office with Matty, Mac and Riley hovering awkwardly in the hall behind them.

"Riley," Matty says, without taking her eyes off the name plaque beside the door, DIRECTOR JAMES MACGYVER inscribed in understated polished metal, "would you mind waiting outside a moment? Jack, Mac, and I need to speak with the Director about a few things before we get you taken care of."

"Sure," she says, sounding like she's nervous and trying to hide it.

The door swings open at the first knock, and Jack is left face to face with Director MacGyver himself for the first time since Matty's revelation. He can hear it in the back of his mind as he meets the man's eyes steady on, _I don't think the Director failed to see the problem, I think the Director is the problem._

_Well,_ Jack thinks, refusing to let his gaze waver. _Game on, sir._


	13. The Doors Will Open Wide For You

this is not the last time i'm going to be apologizing for uploading after way too long but! it's here and i'm not going anywhere. not when we're about to get to some of my favorite parts i have planned.

as always, thank you thank you, and i hope you're enjoying the ride.

* * *

Director MacGyver does not, in fact, think that hiring Riley on full time to handle the technical analytics work for Mac and Jack's team is a wonderful idea. He doesn't quite dismiss it outright. Jack would've actually found it more reassuring if he had - to dismiss the concept he would first have had to acknowledge it as a valid suggestion. Instead, he'd blinked at Jack and Matty like they'd just spoken to him in a language he not only did not speak but could not identify or seem to have heard of. The silence doesn't take long to grow uncomfortable, and Jack takes it upon himself to act as obtuse as possible and assume the Director maybe just didn't hear them properly.

"Riley," he says, bulldozing right on when the Director's attention shifts entirely to him. "We think you should-"

"Yeah," Jack's boss snaps, ending his sentence before he could get halfway through it, "I know what you _think,_ Dalton." It's said with the unspoken implication that Jack and thinking didn't belong in the same sentence with any degree of validity, and Jack bridles at it.

Before either of them can say anything else, the sudden conflict palpable between them, Matty smoothly takes control of the situation. She literally steps in, moving with two quick steps to be standing generally in the middle of the room. There's no evident positioning between James and Jack, not obviously breaking the line of sight between them or protecting one from the other, but she is now the closest to James, commanding the attention of the room be solely on her and what she has to say.

"I know it sounds like probably the worst idea that's been pitched to you in a while, maybe ever," Matty says, in a voice Jack recognizes, from dozens of difficult conversations with people whose power she needed to twist around her own fingers, tug and pull on until the complex marionette of the situation fell into the shape she needed it to be in. "I know how it sounds, trust me, I was skeptical too." It was her idea, but James doesn't, Jack figures, really need to know that. "Just, give me a minute to explain. All I'm asking you is to hear me out. Okay?"

She's given him a way to feel magnanimous, to humor her without intending to take the suggestion seriously at all, and Jack knows that not only by the end of this will James have agreed to what she's proposing, he'll probably somehow think it was his idea to begin with. Matty is just that good. Jack is suddenly very glad that if he has to be investigating his boss, at least it's James, not her. If he had to go up against one of them, he'd pick James any day of the year. If it was Matty, they'd never have stood a chance. Not for a moment.

"What happened today," she says, as if it were just a fluke, a wild outcome, rather than a series of missteps, oversights, and careless disregard, "cannot happen again. I know you're already working on a way to keep it from occurring for a second time, because I know you're fully aware of this. We can't just borrow Riley out of prison again the next time we find ourselves suddenly in need of an analyst of her caliber when all of our viable options are on different continents. And if you can't trust your head of IT to look after the interests of your top team, what can you do to ensure that we won't find ourselves standing in that exact spot a second time? If it could happen once it could happen twice. We both know this."

Really, it wasn't that the head of IT couldn't be trusted, as far as Jack was aware, and more that James himself couldn't be trusted, but of course that's not the point Matty can make here. Instead, she's gone for the angle that leaves James with the perfect opening to feel like he was being vindicated, that his hands had been tied and if the IT depeartment lead couldn't handle his business, how could the Director himself be blamed for it?

"I also know you value the reputation of actors of this agency when we find ourselves needing to work with foreign officials to achieve a mission, regardless of who they think we actually are. And what happened, well, there's no way to put it but this." She pauses and shakes her head, and Jack is floored. It's like she's been rehearsing the monologue the entire way home on the plane, and given he knows her as well as he does, he wouldn't really be surprised if that actually was the case. It's choreographed without looking like it, and Jack just accepts that he's going to spend the rest of his life becoming more terrified of Matilda Webber by the day. "We were embarrassed in front of the Brazillian authorities. To need a Policia guard on the house while we waited to fly in an asset we should've had with us the whole time? It was embarrassing."

"I'm sure it was," James says, mouth turned down in a distasteful sneer, and Jack knows Matty has struck a nerve. Their Director is a proud man, and it's playing right into Matty's hands. "It's shameful."

"Exactly. So we need an analyst we can permanently assign at least to this team, with the type of assignment they're increasingly being sent on. And I can vouch for Riley as far as my personal experience with her goes, but you're in a unique situation here." Another perfectly timed pause, letting what she's about to say build until she says it. "You've got a member of the actual team itself who can vouch for her too. Isn't that right, Jack? You'd vouch for Riley to be assigned to your team permanently?" She glances over her shoulder at him and though her face remains in its perfect mask of confidence, her eyes are hard and sharp. _Don't screw this up for us,_ they say, and Jack nods.

"Yeah, I can. She's good people, Director."

James looks like he's still contemplating the idea, brow wrinkled and lips pressed together in a firm, reluctant line. Jack knows they're balanced on the razor's edge here, that one slight breeze could blow him one way or the other and they'd have their answer. He feels like he should say something to try and influence it, but given how it tends to go when they exchange words, it might have the opposite effect than it needed to if he were to speak up now.

The breeze that comes is not from a direction that Jack would've predicted.

"She's amazing." Mac's voice is sudden and bright from where he's been standing, so far silent, to Jack's left. He hadn't been alerted before they'd walked into the Director's office as to what Matty and Jack had planned, and when the concept was first put forth, he'd looked confused for a moment, but never reluctant or unhappy about the idea. And now he's interjected for the first time through the entire conversation. He's looking at his father steadily, meeting his eye with a kind of confidence Jack isn't used to seeing from him when James is in the room. "That was some of the best work I've ever seen, and she was fast. Our analysts are good, but even they would've had more trouble than she did with Rasmussen's system. We'd have barely scraped by. She left us time to spare. We need her. The agency needs her."

"We need to start hiring new people. We can't keep running at a deficit," Matty says, swinging home the hammer against the nail Mac held up for her. "Now is as good a time as any, and she's the best we're going to find."

The moment the decision is made is visible in the slight shift in James' posture. It would've been evident to nobody but someone very intently looking for it, and Jack holds his breath. James' eyes break away from his son and skate over Matty, coming to focus on Jack himself, piercing and cold. A hand comes up, one finger pointing directly at Jack's chest or maybe his face, it's hard to tell from where he's standing.

"She is _your_ responsibility, Dalton."

_I can't believe that actually worked,_ he thinks, followed almost immediately when the hand does not lower by, _Get your finger out of my face, you jackass._ He says neither of these things out loud, instead opting to nod. Apparently, James still doesn't think his point was made thoroughly enough, as he immediately goes on.

"If she messes up, it's your ass," James says, "and if she _betrays us_ it's your _neck,_ do you understand me? Everything she does is on you. All of it. You really want to stake that on her?"

"Yes sir, I do," Jack replies. At that point, even if he'd had reservations, it was far too late to entertain them. Besides, it was a point of stubbornness by then. He'd have stuck to his guns no matter if they had unreliable sights or tricky triggers, if it meant not giving an inch to James.

"And we are absolutely under no circumstances field training her," the Director tacks on, and Jack mightily resists the powerful urge to roll his eyes.

"You got it. No field training, loud and clear."

For a moment what isn't clear is how successfully Jack managed to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, and James narrows his eyes. Either way, he seems to decide to just let it go, because he straightens up and shakes out his shoulders, focus off of Jack and onto Matty.

"You'll get her sorted out?"

"Yes, I will. I'll get her settled and take care of alerting IT."

"Alright then," James announces, clapping his hands together. Jack doesn't look to see if Mac flinched at the sound, but he's got a pretty good idea of what the answer is. "You're dismissed."

They begin to leave all together, when James' voice stops them, calling after, "Not you, Angus. A word, please."

Jack and Mac lock eyes for a moment before he turns around, and though his face has gone blank, his eyes are wide, frozen in the look of a rabbit that's been caught in the beam of a hunter's flashlight. Jack tries to look reassuring, extremely reluctant though he is to leave Mac alone with a man he trusts less and less by the minute. He's not sure how well it works though, and before he knows it, the door has swung shut, cutting him off from what's about to be said between the Director and Mac. Jack swallows down the feeling that he's just abandoned the partner he's supposed to keep safe alone to a pit of vipers, and looks over at Matty, catching her attention.

"That," he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the room they'd just left, "was a work of art, Matty."

"I know," she agrees, eyes bright and a smile of her own on her face.

Mac is only gone less than a minute before he walks back out of the room. Jack scrutinizes his face carefully, looking for any indication of what had been said, and what he finds is not reassuring. The kid looks pale and strained, and the fingers of his right hand twist at the hem of his sleeve. He shakes his head and waves his other hand in a short, choppy swoop through the air, the message clear.

Don't ask.

For the moment, Jack doesn't ask. Mac doesn't look any more upset than he always kind of looks, especially after any kind of one-on-one meeting with the Director, and it's nothing he can do anything about right now. He instead looks over the rest of the hall, spotting Riley sitting on a bench not a hundred feet away. He waits for her attention to fall back on him then beckons her over. They hadn't told her beforehand what they were planning to do, in case it didn't wout after all. It's not the kind of offer Jack and Matty had wanted to make without being sure that they could guarantee it. Now they can, and all that's left is to let Matty work her magic and pitch it in a way that she'll accept.

Riley notices them standing there, waiting for her, and gets up. Her hands swipe over her jeans, then stuff into her pockets, and there's a tilt to her chin higher than usual. She looks almost defiant, and given they hadn't really spoken much since leaving Brazil, Jack can't pinpoint what it is she could be angry at him about at the moment - well, in particular, anyway. In general, what _wasn't_ there for her to be mad about.

It only takes him the few moments that Riley spends crossing the floor between them to figure it out. She's not angry. She's anxious and pretending like she isn't, with a debatable degree of success. It reminds him of Mac, standing next to him now and trying not to radiate the sour nervousness that dogs him like the Director's closed office door at his back.

Riley comes to a stop in front of them, hands still deep in pockets, one eyebrow quirked up. The eyebrow asks the question for her, and Matty takes the initiative to answer it.

"The Director has been spoken with," she says, voice and face giving away nothing about what the nature of that conversation had been and how it had gone, "and we'd like to offer you a job."

The other eyebrow shoots up to join the first, and Riley asks, seemingly without meaning to, "I'm sorry, what?"

"If you agree to sign on with DXS, to come work for us, not only will we keep the original conditions of our agreement wherein you will not return to prison, but you will also be given the opportunity to continue doing what it is you love to do, and in the name of helping a lot of people. What you did today you could do over and over, and you'd be paid to do it. We can also offer you a generous stipend to get you into a decent apartment and back on your feet, and in the meantime we will house you at one of our safehouses in the area."

Matty gives the offer a few moments to sink in, as she had done with James, though there is a very different feeling in the air during this exchange than there had been in that one. Jack feels a sensation almost like pins and needles at the back of his neck, watching the cautious look on her face change to one of contemplation, edging into resolve.

"That is," Matty adds, her conspiratorial smile audible in her voice, "if you think you can tolerate being assigned to Jack's team."

"Jack's team," Riley repeats.

"Yes, you'd be permanently assigned to work with Jack and Mac on missions. The three of you would be a cohesive unit, and barring you deciding to take on side projects with IT, or some sort of technical emergency at DXS, you wouldn't be loaned out to other teams. So. What do you say?"

"When do I start?"

Relief breaks in Jack's chest and a grin takes over his face. None of this feels real. His impossible to unravel partner. The way he was starting to feel like the kid was his responsibility past where Jack was employed to take care of him. Doing a secret investigation with his boss into his boss's boss that's liable to get them both fired or possibly sent to jail. Riley, just, being here at all. It feels so unreal, and yet it is. This is Jack's life.

A knocking sound behind them, from the inside of the Director's office door, jolts Jack out of his bizarre reverie.

"That's my cue," Mac says, his expression gone brittle. "I wish I could come with to drop you off at the safe house, but I've gotta stay here and do review with the Director."

Before he can turn around and re-enter the office, Riley makes a point of holding out her hand, shaking Mac's firmly when he takes it. He looks confused, like he's about to ask a question, but Riley's face betrays nothing. Jack is confused too, watching their hands part and Mac move for the doorknob, but he's quickly distracted by the glimpse of the Director he catches when the door opens and closes behind his partner.

Jack doesn't want to let Mac go into that room alone. The instinct to prevent Mac from being left on his own with James has been growing by increments for weeks, and it's taken a massive leap in the past couple of hours, given the conversation he and Matty had in Brazil. But he has no valid reason to stop him, to follow him into a personal meeting with their boss, never mind the man being Mac's dad on top of it, so he's left to follow Matty and Riley out of the building towards Matty's car, leaving Mac alone inside with James.

The drive to the safe house they're putting Riley up in until she can find an apartment is not a very comfortable one. The air is deafeningly quiet and Jack keeps making awkward eye contact with her in the rearview mirror from where he sits in the passenger's seat. After about ten minutes, halfway into the drive, Riley speaks up, a nonsequiter that shatters the stiff air into chunks that drop like broken glass into Jack's lap.

"So what's 'review' then?" she asks, and Jack frowns. "Mac said he had to stay back and do review, what was he talking about? He didn't seem like he was real excited about it."

A glance beside him shows Jack a look on Matty's face that doesn't reassure him. She's focused on the road in front of her, obviously, but her brow is furrowed and her mouth curved down. She looks confused and troubled, like she doesn't know the answer to Riley's question, and Jack doesn't know how he feels about that.

"Near as I can tell it's some kinda thing the Director does with field agents, after missions where something maybe didn't go so great. I don't think you've gotta worry about it. I haven't even had one yet and I've been here a while, and besides, you're technically not going to be a field agent, you'll be an analyst."

The explanation doesn't seem to do much to reassure her, but she accepts it, looking away out the window. The remainder of the drive passes in the same still quiet as before, Jack sneaking what he hopes is semi-subtle glances at the car's other occupants until they pull up outside the nondescript house on the residential street, mostly composed of students at the nearest university. There's an agent waiting outside, there to stay with her the first night if she doesn't feel comfortable alone, a nice woman Jack hasn't interacted with much. He thinks her name might be Stella or Stephanie or something. Once Riley is safely passed off, saying a quick goodbye with an only mildly irritated look at Jack, Matty and Jack are headed back to the office. Matty offered to just swing him straight home, but Jack's car is still parked in the lot, and besides, there's something else he needs to see to there too.

If the drive to Riley's temporary lodgings had been awkward and uncomfortable, riddled with things said and half-said and talked past, the drive back is not much better. Much in the same way as had happened before, the topic of review is what comes up after several minutes of wordlessness.

"Can you explain for me," Matty says in a way that makes Jack uneasy, "what exactly this review thing is all about."

"Have you actually not heard of it?" he takes the opportunity to ask, confirming what he'd suspected earlier when she shakes her head.

"This is the first time."

"Well, as far as I can tell," Jack explains, "given I haven't had one myself, it's just some kind of debrief the Director does when something goes sideways. Kind of a training thing for field agents, figure out what went wrong, how to avoid it. Makes sense you wouldn't be involved in any, you're the Deputy Director. You don't really go on active missions and I can't imagine he'd have anything to go over with you if you did. I think it's taken him this long to get around to me because like, why invest in somebody you don't think will be around long, right? Mac's had a few. I think they can get pretty harsh, especially with him. He doesn't really talk about it, but, y'know…"

The explanation trails off, letting Matty fill in the rest herself. She's seen the way the Director speaks to his son on a good day, and Jack can't imagine it goes any better in a mission review on what didn't go the way it was supposed to. Something about the whole thing doesn't feel right, Mac is always too nervous, but Jack has chalked it up so far to a generally troubling-at-best relationship with his father, and not asked too many questions about review itself. Maybe he should have.

"We'll keep an eye on it," Matty says firmly, as if hearing his unspoken concerns. Or maybe she was just having the same ones herself.

"Keep an eye on it to do what?" Jack can't help but ask a moment later. It's been pinging around his mind this whole time, since she'd told him that the focus of her investigation has shifted to the Director himself. "If we think he's some kind of problem, if we think he's dangerous, then what can we do about any of it? We don't have that kind of power."

"I'm still working on that part," she admits. "But If something needs doing, we'll find a way to do it."

If it had been anybody else, Jack might have doubted that kind of assertion.

When they reach the parking lot of DXS, Matty pulls over in front of the building to let Jack off. He's out of the car and standing on the pavement, eyes raking around for the person he'd come back to retrieve as well as his own car, when Matty's voice stops him, calling his name. Jack stills with one hand still on the door, halfway closed, and looks back at her. "What?"

"Riley."

"What about her?" There's a look on Matty's face that is making Jack nervous but excited, a conspiratorial smile that's half determined and half amused.

"When do you want to start her field training?"

Jack laughs, loud and bright, and closes the door.


	14. Tried To Teach Me The Hard Way

why do i keep posting chapters in the middle of the night? this is never a great idea. at any rate! im writing faster now, and feeling great about it, we're getting into what in my notes is 'the good part'.

as always thank you for your lovely words and please continue letting me know your thoughts!

* * *

Once the door closes behind him, cutting Mac off from the trio left standing outside in the hall, the office feels as if it gets colder by degrees. His arms prickle and Mac wants to look away, anywhere but at the stony face of the Director. Since the moment the job started, he knew this was coming. Things went wrong from the word 'go', and review was inevitable. That doesn't mean he has to be excited about it. No matter how many times he goes through this process, it makes him unspeakably nervous, and this is the worst part. The part before the review itself begins, and it's just Mac and James, alone in a room. A silent, tense room.

When Mac was a kid, his grandfather used to take him to museums. The old man would bring along a book or several different morning edition newspapers, and park himself near the lobby, and just let Mac roam on his own. He was never disruptive, well-behaved and quiet, enthralled in the exhibits, and so he was allowed to continue doing this, spending as much time as he liked at whichever exhibits really caught his eye.

There had been one that had unsettled him so badly he'd never gone back to that particular section of the museum, one on natural sciences. It held grand halls full of bones and preserved specimens from the many large parks surrounding their area of California, from Joshua Tree up through the Redwoods, and back behind all of that was a small, lesser-visited corridor that Mac wandered down one day when he was maybe eleven or twelve years old.

It was an exhibit on butterflies and moths, and he was never able to shake the sight. It rattled him deeply and inexplicably, looking up at the wide, tall cases of monarchs and swallowtails, polyphemus and codling moths. He'd dreamed about them periodically since seeing them that day. Hundreds of pairs of delicate wings pierced by long, thin pins, splayed out and trapped, silent and helpless. He imagines that maybe this is how they had felt, those trapped butterflies, skewered to specimen boards under bright lights, curious eyes boring into them. No chance for escape, even if they had been alive.

Mac feels pinned now, James staring at him with the same sharpness he'd imagined those pins had, attention intense and focused solely on him. Mac's mouth feels dry, and the underside of his right hand itches. The edges of a piece of crumpled paper poke into the skin of his palm, reminding him of the odd handshake Riley had left him with, the folded secret she'd pressed into his hand, out of the sight of Matty and Jack. It's something of an odd comfort now, hidden away in his hand where James can't see it, and Mac focuses on that now, concentrating on the paper rather than on his father as the review finally starts.

James doesn't yell. He does sometimes, voice pitching up and down though a furious tirade on some problem Mac should've solved faster, a civilian injury he should've prevented, some embarrassment DXS had suffered at his hands. This time, though, is one of the times he doesn't, his voice remaining even and calm as he starts in on their recent trip to Rio. He doesn't sound angry, though Mac knows for a fact he is, and it's somehow worse than if he had clearly showed it, been upfront and transparent with how badly Mac had screwed up this time.

Mac would prefer it if he was yelling. Yelling is superior, given the choice between the frying pan and the fire, to this cold stillness. Still waters run deep, so the saying went, and the calmer James appeared on the surface, the more incensed he was inside. It's been this way all Mac's life and it's left him constantly off balance, wondering even when the man seemed happy with him if it might all be a ruse, a decoy hiding the true nature of James' fury.

They're playing one of James' favorite games today, the one where he acts like he doesn't know what happened while Mac's team was offsite, and needs to be filled in on what it was, exactly, that didn't go according to plan. It's a way of forcing Mac to outline his own mistakes and faults himself, picking apart his own conduct and pulling out pieces to find dissatisfactory. If he misses something, James' jaw will go progressively tighter, his eyes narrowing, until Mac fishes around to find what it is the man thinks he's left out. If he still doesn't find it, he'll be subjected not only to an explanation of what James was actually waiting to hear, but a stern lecture about how hiding faults doesn't make them go away, and if they don't review what happened, there's no way he'll do better next time. So yeah. Mac would prefer if he just started yelling – at least that part is straightforward.

Of course, this time, Mac knows exactly what it is that James is waiting to hear. Before he can get there, though, he has to go through the rest of it, outlining their lack of an analyst on the ground with them, Amos Bright's assignment to Moscow at exactly the wrong moment. Of course, these things had been outside of Mac's control, but he goes through them anyway, hoping at least that once they're laid out, they can move on, and James won't manage to find some way to make them his fault. He doesn't, actually, though Mac supposes he's probably more focused on the real point of this meeting rather than finding other things to twist until they were a matter of Mac's personal failings as an agent and a person.

"And then what happened when you and Dalton called to update home base on the issue you were facing?" James' voice is still that cool, calm tone, and Mac hates it. He grits his teeth, holding the folded paper from Riley just a little tighter.

"I let the situation get the better of me," he says, forcing the words out through a throat that feels tight and hot. "I let my emotions control my behavior, and I acted out. It was unprofessional and there's no excuse for it." Though the situation may be different, the wording is familiar. Mac has been down this road many times before. He's always been too anxious, too emotional, lacking in control and decorum. Lacking in sufficient deferential respect for his superiors and specifically James.

"That's right," James says, voice going fractionally louder, and Mac knows they've reached the point, the bit his father's been waiting to get to all along. "There is no excuse for your behavior on this mission, Angus, I'm disappointed. I wish I could say I'm surprised too, but I'm frankly not at this point. You are a part of me, here, an extension of-"

"I'm not you, though." It's a mistake, and Mac knows it is from the moment he speaks, the first syllable punching its way out of his mouth uncontrollably. He couldn't help it. The assertion James is fond of making, that Mac is supposed to function like a copy of him, allowing James to essentially be in two places at once, frustrates Mac as much as it scares him.

A beat of silence reigns, and James stares at him, hard. Mac thinks of the pinned monarch, the inescapable bright light over its display.

"When you are here," the man says, the words icy and immaculately articulated, "you are to function as an extension of me, Angus. That's what you've been trained for. It's what you're here for. You are an extension of me and you are expected to behave accordingly."

Mac swallows, choking down a second protest before it can land him in hotter water. The pot he's already in is scalding as it is. He nods, chin dipping once and stilling.

"I shouldn't need to be babysitting you on assignments," James goes on, never mind that his conduct while Mac and Jack had been in Brazil couldn't be accurately termed anything near 'babysitting'. The only way he could've been more hands off is if he'd given the briefing over, as he sometimes did, to Matty entirely. "And you need to control yourself, do you hear me? You're not a child, you can't let your temper run away with you like that, especially not in front of other people. In front of our work colleagues. You disrespected me today. You shouted at me and swore at me on that call like some drunk and disorderly frat boy."

"Yes, sir," Mac mutters. He knows what the pause in James' lecture was for, and he can't afford to ruffle any more feathers by missing it. "Sorry, sir."

"And not only did you do this, you did it in front of your partner and my Deputy. Do you understand what that does to your reputation? Do you understand what that does to my reputation, if I have an agent cursing at me and questioning the way I choose to lead this agency in front of subordinates?"

Another deliberate pause.

"Yes sir. Sorry sir."

"Your partner," James says, and somehow, impossibly it seems, Mac gets more tense. For some reason, the idea of James dragging Jack into this, somehow bringing him up in this review, is one that makes Mac bristle. Jack does not belong in this conversation.

"What about him?" Mac asks. He bites the inside of his cheek to keep from going on further, insisting that he hadn't done anything wrong, that the problems had all been Mac, the disrespect all Mac. None of it had been Jack. It wasn't his fault.

"Dalton needs to respect me."

Mac bites down harder. The taste of copper spreads over the side of his tongue and his eyes sting, but he doesn't let up. He can't afford to have an outburst right now.

"If he doesn't, if he was to learn somewhere that respecting me and the authority of my office is in any way optional, then he and I are going to start to have a problem. You know what that means."

Indeed Mac does know what that means, and he nods, wordless. He doesn't want to lose this partner. He's already had too many, faces cycling into and out of his life like dramatic wildlife portraits on the pages of a tourist trap store calendar, and he doesn't want to get used to another, less than three quarters of a year after meeting this one. More than that, too, it isn't just that he doesn't want to lose another partner to James' temper. He doesn't want to lose Jack. It's a realization that makes him feel cold and afraid, because it makes him vulnerable. It puts another weapon into James' hands, to hold over his head in moments like this one, and it gives Jack the ability to hurt him as well. Probably best to curb that kind of thought, that Jack might mean something more than the last guy did, or the woman before him, before the feeling roots itself in him too deeply to excise.

"So, going forward," says James, indicating that if anything, at least today's review is going to turn out to be a relatively short one, "what is it we're going to keep in mind, then?"

"I am to speak to you with respect, alone and in front of others, and especially in front of my partner," Mac says numbly.

"And?"

"I function as an extension of you. It's important that I act like it, and on this mission, I didn't."

It's unclear if James finds this conclusion satisfactory, scrutinizing him intently with flinty blue eyes. Mac feels fourteen years old again, waiting to see if his groveling and self-flagellation will be accepted or if more will be demanded of him before he's allowed to make a quick, desperate escape from his father's study. Eventually, James must come to the conclusion that no more is necessary at the moment, breaking eye contact and looking away from him entirely. When James moves, he does so abruptly, and it's difficult for Mac to reign in the instinctive flinch at the unexpected step. He turns and merely goes back and sits down behind his desk, returning to his chair and pulling a folder out of his inbox, leaving Mac feeling incredibly foolish.

"You're dismissed," James tells him, without looking up from the task he's moved onto. "Go home."

Before James can change his mind, as he does sometimes, remembering something else and calling him back to do the whole thing over again, Mac makes a break for it. He slips out through the door, closing it softly behind himself. The last thing he needs right now is for the entire hall of department chiefs to see him get loudly scolded for slamming a door.

As he walks down the hall away from his father's office, Mac tries not to think too hard about what had just happened. It's stupid to ruminate on, because really, what _had_ just happened? Nothing, materially. Sure, it had been humiliating and degrading to stand there and be lectured about his faults, to go over for the hundredth time how the training James had invested so much time and effort into hadn't resulted in the agent Mac was supposed to grow up to be. Sure, it stung (more than stung, hurt beyond his ability to describe the feeling) to have it reinforced once again that he was a disappointment, as an operative and a son, but what of it? Isn't this exactly what James was always trying to drill into him? That feeling didn't mean anything, nothing without something real to back them up, that Mac was an oversensitive child when he needed to grow up and get his act together, start proving his worth.

Mac plants his shoulder into the door and opens it with a hard shove, scrubbing a wrist angrily over his eyes as he goes. James' words, from today and last month and last year and all of the twenty years before that one play around and around in his mind. Grow up. Grow a spine. Get it together. Calm down. You're overreacting. You're making a scene. You're embarrassing me. It's nothing. It's nothing. It's _nothing._

The evening air is crisp and still cooling, reminding Mac that it's turned November, and though they enjoy a temperate climate here, not even Southern California is immune to the relative chill of winter. He shivers a little as he breathes deliberately deeply and slowly, trying to quell the feeling in his chest like his lungs have been spiderwebbed over inside with fiberglass, itchy and painful and upset. It's standing there, staring out over the rapidly emptying parking lot, that Mac remembers something that has a great deal of importance when it comes to what his next move is going to be. His car is not in that lot.

It feels like it was several days ago that Jack had picked him up that morning, driving them both in to work together. In reality, it hasn't been very long at all, less than two days in total, but that didn't change the fact that they'd left Mac's car behind, where it still presumably sits dormant and useless in the driveway. And, since Jack went with Matty to drop Riley off at her temporary residence, Mac is now left with no way to get home.

He tries to squash it, the way that thought leaves him immediately feeling colder, small and alone. For reasons Mac can't quite identify and doesn't really want to try too hard to understand, he suddenly wishes with a ferocity that takes him utterly by surprise that Jack were here with him right now. Not even just for the ride home. Just because Mac doesn't want to be by himself, and somewhere, somehow, at some point, Jack had become an alternative that felt safe.

It's _not_ safe to let someone in like that, not beyond what it takes to work together. Hadn't James spent years trying to teach him that? Hadn't Walsh been enough, the boogeyman that had haunted Mac's father's thoughts for years, motivated his every move even now?

And still, here he is, wishing Jack would show up and take him home. James is right. Mac needs to get a grip and stop projecting more onto this relationship than is there. It's embarrassing, and it isn't what Jack signed up for.

Nothing else for it, Mac steels himself to turn around and go back inside. He'll have to ask James for a ride home. If anything, maybe the request will do something to appease the man, take the edge off the anger Mac knows is still simmering. James is slow to forgive and never forgets, and maybe having to walk back in there with his head hung and grovel for help is the answer to getting the process to move faster. For all that he expects Mac to be faultless and hypercompetent at work, he and his father's relationship looks markedly different when it comes to the personal. Half the time Mac could swear James thinks he's still an elementary schooler having trouble tying his shoes by himself.

There's an odd, satisfied glint that James gets sometimes when Mac needs his help, like he's just had a point proved and been made to feel needed and important in the same move. Sometimes, Mac has a hard time figuring out what's asked of him today - robotic perfection or helpless incompetence? It's a life of constant, warring contradictions and though it's a tough balancing act, Mac has at least been doing this long enough to get pretty good at it.

Before he can actually set foot back in the building, a sound cuts into Mac's awareness, abrupt and startling, causing a hard flinch to seize through his body and sending his heart thundering in his chest. He whips around, looking for the car whose horn has just beeped at him, and does a further double-take when he sets eyes on the offending vehicle - or, more accurately, who is driving it. Jack. The person who'd honked at him is Jack.

Mac squints at him through the growing dark, and walks a few steps closer to the car. He can't seem to wrap his mind around having just been thinking about Jack, wishing he'd been there to get him away from this building and the man somewhere inside it, and then there he was, idling by the curb.

"What, thought I forgot I was your ride home?" Jack's voice is as easygoing as the light smile on his face, and Mac looks down and away. He can't bring himself to admit that no, he hadn't thought Jack had forgotten, he just didn't think it really mattered. Luckily, Jack doesn't seem to have a lot of expectations right now, conversation wise, and merely leans over to pop open the passenger's side door.

The drive from DXS to Mac and Bozer's house is quiet and calm, and as he sits there in Jack's car, Mac can feel his body begin to ache. This happens after missions, especially ones where he has to do a review afterwards, times when stress and tension has left the muscles in his shoulders and back a knotted mess. Whether it's the warmth of Jack's car, the distance from the office and from James, something about Jack's own presence, Mac doesn't know. All he knows is that, as he relaxes minutely, the pain arrives, his body receiving the message that it doesn't have to be on high alert any more, and can begin to relax and feel again. There's a throb in his jaw that reminds Mac of the last time he'd been to a dentist and told he would need to stop grinding his teeth or he'd damage them.

They reach the driveway without Jack making any mention of how tightly wound Mac seemed, coming out of the building after the review they both know had taken place, and Mac is grateful for this. He doesn't want to explain why going over his mission mistakes with his father makes him feel like his insides are twisting into painful snarls, why even on the best of days being stuck in a room by himself with James was an outcome he wanted to avoid at all costs. It's not like he'd been in any danger, had any kind of justification to be sitting here feeling like he's been on the edge of a panic attack for more than an hour, and that's something he doesn't want to try and explain to Jack.

"Thanks," is all he says, and Jack doesn't respond out loud, just smiles and nods, something a little troubled about his expression.

Halfway up the short walkway from the drive to the front porch, Mac suddenly remembers something. He stops, shoving a hand into the pocket of his pants and fishing out the paper he'd been given when Riley insisted on giving him a handshake when they'd separated earlier in the day. It's small and looks like it was torn out of the edge of someone's notebook, cramped handwriting that he assumes to be Riley's scrawled out over it. The message is short and to the point, and Mac squints to read it in the dim illumination of the porch light.

_Gave me a temp phone. Here's the #. Riley._

Mac would think it wasn't what he was expecting to see written on it, but that would imply he'd had any reasonable idea of what to expect at all. It's certainly interesting, and he makes a note to send the number on the paper a message when he gets inside and has the chance to get settled. Mac has a good feeling about Riley, though he can't imagine she's having a very easy time right now, alone and pitched into a new life she never could've predicted was coming just a day earlier. As he opens the front door and looks around, surrounded by the familiar sights, smells, and sounds of home, he begins to get an idea.


	15. Some Truths

it's all coming togetheeerrrrrrrrr. i'm really excited for the next chapter guys - and the good news is that means it should be written pretty fast. enjoy, and thanks as always for reading and letting me know your thoughts!

this chapter's title is very vaguely from sleeping at last's 'south'

* * *

Home welcomes Mac like a salve soothes away the harshest edges of a burn. He stops for a minute in the hallway just outside the door, keys still in hand, jacket and shoes still in place, and just breathes it in. He stopped taking it for granted a while ago, the fact that at the end of the day, he would be able to get up and go home. Maybe he never did. His life wasn't one that had ever really leant itself to the certainty of things like getting to go home, never mind being safe when he got there.

"Hey."

Bozer's voice from the living room snaps Mac's attention up from the keys digging into his palm, the blue and green dish waiting for them on the small table, the seemingly insurmountable four feet separating the two. He makes no move to close the gap as Bozer approaches, feeling drained and rooted to the spot. It's an odd, embarrassing predicament Mac finds himself in more often than he'd care to admit - he stops moving once he's safely inside the door and then takes longer than is reasonable to find the energy to get started again. Bozer walks over, hands in his pockets and posture casual, though there's an apprehensive frown on his face as he scans Mac over.

"You okay?" Bozer asks, clearly having found something to be concerned about, and Mac figures his face must be doing something he didn't give it permission to do.

"Performance evaluation," he says shortly, shaking himself back to life and tossing the keys into the dish.

That's what he's been calling them at home since the practice started, the closest he can come to explaining reviews to his roommate. Bozer knows who is boss is, after all. He understands what it means for Mac to be evaluated by James, what sort of color commentary was likely to be involved. After all, he's been there for fifteen years' worth of James' standards and the way Mac has to measure up to him, the consequences that follow when he inevitably fails to do so.

"Performance evaluation," Bozer repeats, voice toneless, looking right at Mac. "Right."

There's a set to Bozer's chin and a frown on his forehead that indicates to Mac that there's something he's not saying. Probably a lot he's not saying, actually. Mac harbors no illusions about the mutual distaste that exists between his best friend and his father - and that on Bozer's end at least, 'distaste' is probably an overly mild way to phrase things. He's not oblivious to the fact that there's a lot that Bozer swallows down and doesn't say when it comes to James, opinions and disagreements and no small amount of anger. It's a wonder sometimes, to Mac, a guilty wonder, that it hasn't choked him by now.

Just as he's done for years stacked on years, whatever he'd wanted to say, Bozer doesn't say it, and instead gestures towards the kitchen.

"Got takeout Thai for dinner, there's leftovers in the fridge."

Mac is grateful that, when their paths cross on the way down the hall, this isn't one of the times Bozer welcomes him home with a hug. It's not that he doesn't want one - right now, actually, there's very little in the world he wants more. It's just that if he's hugged at this moment in time, so soon after a review, if he is at this point folded into the arms of someone who loves him and held tight there, like his pain is visible and important, he's probably going to lose it something awful. If Bozer hugged him right now, Mac would likely break down crying, and neither of them needs that to happen. Instead, he passes by without incident, and is soon perched at the kitchen island with a carton of curry in front of him and the paper Riley had pressed into his hand laid out on the table.

"Gonna explain your weird little paper," Bozer asks, coming around to sit across from him, "or are you saving candy wrappers to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower with again?"

"It was the Arc de Triomphe actually and no, I'm not. We got a new analyst assigned to us," he says, then winces. 'Assigned to us' isn't even remotely close to an accurate description of how Riley's permanent placement came to be.

The paper is forgotten for the moment as the extended reality of what, exactly, the hiring of a new permanent analyst means sinks in.

"They replaced Nikki," Bozer says, and Mac nods. "That's gotta feel weird."

The observation makes Mac snort a little, a humorless and instinctive reaction. "There isn't anything about this that doesn't feel weird," he says, shaking his head and staring out into space, somewhere to the left of Bozer's shoulder. "But yeah. It does feel odd, having someone else there, doing Nikki's job after what… what happened with her."

Amongst everything else that's been going on, with the purge of DXS and the fallout, James' increased paranoia, the arrival and adjustment to his partnership with Jack, the impact of Nikki's betrayal and arrest has sort of gotten lost in the mix of it. She had been a part of his life, though, and it had been an intensely personal shock as well as a professional one, when the truth about her came out. Mac had been involved with her in a way that he should've known better than to allow to happen - James made that much very, very clear when he'd found out about what was happening between them. It didn't get as far as it might have, their relationship, but it got farther than James deemed acceptable, and Mac knows he's right.

"She's a little different." Mac shifts away from thinking about Nikki to talking about Riley. She's a safer topic by far - and a more immediately interesting and relevant one. "Riley."

"I'll say, if she, uh." Bozer pokes at the now remembered paper, exposing the numbers scrawled over it. "Gave you her number on her first day?"

There's a tone in Bozer's voice that implies something that causes Mac to roll his eyes.

"It's not like that," he says, and it really isn't. His mind hasn't gone there at all, and he doesn't think hers has either. "I think she's just… I think she needs somebody in her corner. I think she needs a friend. We, uh…" It's hard to find a way to explain it without just going right out and explaining it, so Mac decides to take a chance and put it in the simplest, most true terms possible. "She was in prison. We got her on our team because she was released from prison." 'Released' being a loose term for what happened there, but as close to the truth as he can get.

In a move that is justified and frankly to be expected, Bozer's eyebrows go up sharply. "Prison," he repeats, like he can't believe what he's just heard.

"Not for anything like- She wasn't in for any kind of violent crime. It was… Think hactivist kind of stuff." Again, it's a very simple way to put a very complicated situation, but it's the best Mac can do, and he can see the gears churning over it in Bozer's brain as he tries to decide how he feels about that. Mac adds, "Matty knows her. She's worked with her before, I guess."

Though Matty hasn't been with DXS much longer than Jack has, she's quickly gained a reputation around their household as a woman to be respected, admired, and obeyed. She and Bozer have only met once, in the parking lot one day as he was dropping Mac off for work, but it was a memorable meeting, and Mac knows that Matty's opinion of a person will go a long way in Bozer's books. And if the rest of this conversation is to go the way he hopes it will, he needs Bozer to at least preliminarily accept the idea of Riley being a good person to allow into their home and their lives.

"We can't get it right all the time, I suppose." There's enough humor in Bozer's response, once he's gotten over his rather shocked quiet, that Mac deems it safe enough to move on with his next point.

"I was gonna ask you, actually," he says, and it takes every concentrated bit of effort in his body to prevent his hands from shaking. "Like I said, I think she needs a friend, and I think it'd be good for her to get to spend some time with people our age, so…"

"Bring her over, for sure," Bozer agrees before Mac has time to finish or even figure out how to finish the question. "I'll roll out the welcome wagon."

It hadn't been like Mac was asking permission to bring her over at all - that was never any kind of household rule they'd adhered to, formerly incarcerated or no. It was more that he was asking Bozer to hang out with them, to help provide some of the normalcy and friendship Mac was hoping could help ease the disruption Riley's many simultaneous transitions. He's never been in prison but he knows a thing or two about being alone and thrown about, from situation to situation you have no say in, and he knows how rocky it can be when you hit the ground, especially when you're expected to be ready to run the moment you land.

"You have a good feeling about her?"

Mac nods, and it's an agreement without hesitation. "Yeah, I do. She helped us out in a big way and we spent several hours together. Matty vouches for her. Jack vouches for her." At Bozer's questioning look, Mac shrugs. "I don't know the whole story, but I guess he used to date her mom or something. Things are a little awkward with them. But he says she's good people, and I don't know. I think I believe him." At what point, exactly, Jack's word became a trustworthy verification of the quality of a person's character in Mac's mind is left unquestioned, and Mac is glad for that. He wouldn't have an answer, and doesn't want to think hard enough on it to find one.

They both head to bed pretty quickly after that. Mac stays at the kitchen island for a few moments longer than Bozer does, sending a quick text to the number Riley gave him on the piece of paper. She answers immediately, confirming that things at the safe house seem fine, and she's been set up with spare clothing and other immediate necessities. Mac is relieved to hear this. A part of him feels oddly responsible for her, a duty to make sure that she's adequately provided for and as safe and comfortable as possible. It's not that he thinks James would leave her in the lurch after having just hired her on, but he feels the compulsive need to verify nonetheless, and it sets him fractionally more at ease to hear she's doing well.

Mac walks slowly down the hall, trying to relax before he reaches his room and rolling his shoulders as he goes. The scar on his neck has begun to ache, the way it always does when he spends too long too tensed up and finally begins to release and calm. He reaches up to rub at it, grimacing and trying to stretch it out until the pain fades away. It doesn't, and Mac does his best to ignore it. He supposes he could pop a few ibuprofen, or one of the other over the counter painkillers taking up residence in his bathroom sink drawer, but he tries to avoid that as much as possible. Too much would damage his liver, James had always warned him, and he ends up worse for the wear much too often to take medication every time something hurts. It'll pass. It always does.

That night, Mac dreams of butterflies, and of struggling, trapped behind glass, while hundreds of pairs of featureless eyes bore relentlessly into him. He wakes feeling restless and unsettled, and tries to put it out of his mind.

Bozer and Riley get along very well, once Bozer overcomes the initial tongue-tiedness that always seems to strike him when confronted with someone that pretty. On her first visit to the house, Riley is a little awkward. She holds herself stiffly and her eyes flick from object to object, seemingly cataloguing the whole room over and over again throughout the course of the afternoon. But she relaxes, too, and when Mac drops her back off at the safe house, she's smiling at him when she leaves, a little bewildered and slightly overwhelmed, but a smile nevertheless.

It takes DXS a week and a half to get Riley out of the safe house and into an actual apartment. In that time, she spends many an afternoon at Mac and Bozer's house, warming to the boys quickly and getting comfortable in their company. She turns out to have a knack for biting sarcasm and video games, and she's interested enough in Bozer's filmmaking experiments to lean over tables of molds and ask questions about their use and construction.

Things have been tense at work, between Jack and Riley. There's nothing really overt about it - they don't fight or insult each other too viciously, or dredge up old issues to rehash them in the open. But there's a stiffness in the air, odd looks shot between them when they think no one is paying attention, and it's given Mac an uneasy feeling in his gut. He wants to ask, but he doesn't at the same time, because whatever the answer is, there won't be any taking it back once he knows it. It's not that he thinks Jack has done anything unforgivable or monstrous back when Riley was a kid - some part of him balks at even the suggestion that he'd be capable of that sort of thing - but there are things about Riley that he can't ignore or deny. Some of the things about her, the way she does things and looks at people, are devastatingly familiar, and Mac knows exactly why _he_ looks at the world like it's moments from lashing out at him at the drop of a pin. He doesn't want to imagine why she does.

They're sitting at a table in the food court of IKEA, remnants of a late lunch spread between them, when he finally breaks down and asks her.

It had been Bozer's idea to go there in the first place. The apartment they got Riley into wasn't furnished but there was, as Matty had promised, a generous stipend set aside for her to get settled. This came up vaguely while the three of them were sitting in Mac and Bozer's living room, and before anyone knew what was happening, they were all piled into the car, headed to IKEA. Before the mission to furnish Riley's apartment, thus allowing her to finally actually move into it, can commence, Bozer insists they have to stop at the cafeteria on the second floor, claiming it to be an 'unskippable IKEA tradition'. Riley hadn't known the place contained a cafeteria at all, and though she'd seemed a little dubious about it, there they all ended up.

Riley and Mac have a moment to themselves when Bozer steps away to pick a desert out of the cases, and Mac takes the opening before he can think himself out of it to say, "Jack."

"What about him?" Riley's face has gone funny, crumpled in a guarded half-frown, and Mac winces, apologetic.

"I have to ask. The reason you and Jack- the reason you're angry with him. I know he used to date your mom and it's none of my business obviously, what happened, but… was he, y'know. A bad person? Is that why you- like, did he- was he a bad person?'

He knows she knows what he's asking and though something flashes in her eyes, it isn't doubt or hesitation.

"No," she says, simply and immediately. "He wasn't. That's part of the problem. He was great." There's a pause while she looks over, and for a moment, both of them watch Bozer, who is still over by the desert case, seeming to be pondering a cheesecake or some fancy thing with chocolate ganache. "And it wasn't really his fault," Riley says, as Bozer opens the case. Her voice is quiet and a little embarrassed. "I'm not ready to forgive him, but it wasn't just on him. He's safe. I promise."

Something Mac's chest unknots and releases, relief making his skin prickle.

"Thank you," he says, feeling bad for having asked, but knowing he had to. If he'd gotten a different answer, one worse than he'd prepared for, Mac would've known he had to do something, but now… It had been such a specific answer, 'he's safe', and Mac knows what it means. It means that while he was noticing things about her, the things that meant he had to ask, she was noticing things about him too.

They don't talk any more or look at each other, but Mac taps Riley's shoe with his under the table, and she taps back, and it feels like they've come to some kind of understanding.

The three of them meander through IKEA together, and it's so normal it feels unreal. Riley carries one of those little notepads and writes item codes down whenever a decision is made, with Bozer pointing things out and Mac trailing behind them. As it turns out, it's a very good thing they'd brought Bozer along, given he has proven himself to be the only person amongst the three of them with any grasp of interior design. He makes little faces and weird noises in his throat when Mac or Riley try to suggest something that 'disagrees with the mood you've been going for,' and once it's been established that yes, Riley would like her furniture to look like it 'agrees', and no, she doesn't know how to make that happen, Bozer is deputized as the official decision maker of the outing.

So far, Riley has, with the guidance of Bozer, picked out a couch, a low set of drawers that could also function as a tv stand, and a dining room set. There are crowds of other people around them, chatting amongst themselves about their own home furnishing dilemmas, and Mac feels like if he closed his eyes, he could get lost in it. Families with young children weave around odd assortments of college students, young professionals who've bought their first home. They're all so normal. It all feels so _normal._

The edge of a rug catches up under Mac's shoe, as he'd apparently stopped paying attention to where he was going, and he nearly trips and falls flat on his face in the middle of a display of a minimalist kitchen. When he straightens up and looks around, he sees that Riley and Bozer were both watching him, and one after the other they lose their ability to pretend they aren't laughing. He gives them a half-hearted glare before cracking and grinning himself. To the rest of the world, they must have looked like one of those sets of college students, meandering around for the furnishings of a shared residence, and something about it is comforting. For a moment, it's easy to pretend that's what they are.

On the way home, the topic turns again to Jack, in a much different way than it had in the cafeteria when Mac and Riley had been alone. This time is about the previous day, when he'd inadvertently been discussing the Director's assistant with the wide-eyed day security chief while the man stood not six feet behind him. From there it went on to other moments where Jack put his foot in it, and whether Riley and Mac thought he was doing it on purpose or not, while Bozer listened along, fascinated.

They drop her off at the safe-house for one last night, promising to return the next day to help put together the furniture that should be delivered in the morning. The drive home from the safe-house, explained to Bozer as the home of an Aunt in the area, is a pleasant, companionable silence, the radio playing softly in the cab of the car. It has been a good day, and Mac feels settled, more at peace after his conversation with Riley. They park outside the house, and Mac reaches for the door handle, but before he can get there, something stops him.

"You should bring him over to the house." The statement comes suddenly and without context, and Mac looks over at Bozer and frowns. At this, he elaborates, saying, "Jack. I want to meet him. You two have been partners for long enough, I've heard stories, and it sounds like he's one of the best you've had recently. Maybe the best since-" He cuts off before he can say the name, though Mac's chest throbs like he'd said it anyway. "Anyway. You should bring him by. It's past time."

"Okay," Mac finds himself saying, agreeing sooner and more readily than he'd have predicted he would've done. Bozer is right. It's past time. "I will."


	16. When I Was Drowning

not gonna lie i've been looking forward to this chapter since this fic started. i hope you all like it as well and i've done justice to what i was trying to do.

title this chapter is from radical face's song 'personal giants'.

a brief chapter warning: significant focus in second half of chapter on mac's grandfather's death and its impact on him.

* * *

Jack isn't expecting it when Mac says it, milling around in the briefing room waiting for James to come and let them know where they'll be heading on their first mission as a complete team. Mac has been giving him odd looks all morning, but there's not much Mac does that _isn't_ odd in one way or another, so he'd been trying not to read too much into it. It bursts out of him like a nervous dachshund who's broken free of its owner's leash, though, and once it's out, Mac looks like he might choose to take it back if he could. Jack can't really see why - it had just been an invitation to dinner at his place with him, Bozer, and Riley in attendance. Then again, nothing is ever really 'just' anything when it came to Mac, especially things of a personal nature.

Moments after the invitation was issued, Mac still looking nervous beyond all belief, Jack is pre-empted from being able to answer when James walks in and the briefing starts. Jack barely has a moment to say, "Yeah, I'll be there," and they're off to their first official mission with Riley. Mac looks relieved, but the anxiety hasn't entirely gone away. Any lessening of the impending doom look on his face is a win in Jack's book, though, and he'll take what he can get.

The mission is a resounding success, and Jack comes home feeling proud of his team's work, and looking forward to spending time with them outside the office. He's also looking forward to officially meeting Mac's roommate, the one he's seen a handful of times from up the driveway, heard stories about from Mac, but never directly interacted with. They've been home for about forty-five minutes, and Jack is just about to leave the room they've been bringing James up to speed in, follow Mac and Riley out into the hallway, when the man steps in front of the doorway, stopping him.

"Dalton, wait," James says, and Jack's hackles go up immediately.

"What?" he asks, trying not to sound too defensive, let any amount of a snarl into his voice. Jack is finding that his patience with James grows thinner by the day, waning with every cold interaction he sees between the Director and Mac, until it's only attachment and loyalty to the kid himself that's keeping him from butting heads with his boss every time they share space in the same room.

"I heard you, earlier, when my son invited you over to his house."

It had been just a little too neat, the timing of James' arrival in the room, and Jack can see it now, the Director standing outside and listening into the conversation happening within. For a moment Jack thinks James is about to tell him not to go, citing some nonsense rule about whatever he can come up with to keep them from interacting outside of work, and he's ready to argue, to protest and point out that he has no right to decide what either he or Mac does outside of this building, but that's not what ends up being said at all.

"Angus's roommate. Wilt Bozer."

"What about him?" Jack asks, frowning deeper. Wherever this is going to go, it can't be good.

"He doesn't know what we do here," James says, something Jack was perfectly aware of, thanks very much, then goes on. "It's not going to be exactly _difficult_ to keep it from him, you're not dealing with some kind of Sherlock Holmes type character. Frankly, I don't know what's kept he and Angus so close for this long, it's not like they're on remotely the same level, intellectually. He's a nice enough kid, sweet and great with a camera, but my son just operates on a different level, which I'm sure you know by now. At any rate, just, please try and not say anything in front of him that'll blow the secrecy of this whole organization, do you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," Jack grinds out, forcing a smile onto his face. It's a disrespectful way to talk about one's son's best friend, and it actually makes Jack more excited to meet him. His distaste for his boss has grown to such a degree that by now, if James doesn't like somebody, that's practically a recommendation in Jack's book. But, for Mac's sake, he can't kick the hornet's nest, so he makes himself thank James before beating a hasty retreat outside.

When they pull up outside Mac and Bozer's house, the interaction is still fresh in Jack's mind, and he rolls his eyes as he walks up to the front porch. It's not like his plan had been to bust in the front door and introduce himself by going, hi, my name is Jack Dalton, I work with your roommate at a top secret spy organization where we jet around the world disarming nuclear bombs and rescuing diplomats while embassies are under siege, love your living room decor. Please.

The living room decor is, actually, pretty interesting to look at. Bozer shows him around with an easy-going energetic excitement that endears him to Jack basically immediately, and Jack looks around with interest, taking in his first look at the place his partner lives. It's happily cluttered with the detritus of a home occupied by two college-aged boys, some of the knick-knacks and decorations certainly taking a more whimsical bent. Jack is particularly fond of the polar bear in the front hallway, presently wearing large round sunglasses. Bozer keeps of a steady stream of chatter as they meander from room to room in what he refers to as 'the grand tour', and the longer they go, the more at ease Mac seems.

By the time they make it all the way back around to the kitchen, Riley is out back trying to get the fire started in the fire pit they apparently have on the back patio, and Mac is rummaging around in the fridge looking for drinks to fill the cooler sitting on the counter full of ice. The whole place has a homey, lived-in feeling that is far from what Jack had been afraid of the first few weeks he and Mac had worked together. He'd imagined Mac living in some cold, empty apartment by himself, missing all those personal touches that make a place a home, or, somehow worse still, living with his father. It had been a relief to be informed the answer was neither, and he lived with an old friend, and it's an even greater relief to actually see inside the house itself.

Speaking also of the old friend.

Bozer looks over his shoulder out the patio sliding doors and winces, abruptly calling out, "Hey, Mac, I'll handle that, do you wanna go make sure Riley doesn't light anything but the actual fire pit on fire out there, looks like she's kinda…"

Mac abandons the fridge with a wince, leaving swiftly out the door to where Riley is crouched next to the fire pit set in the back deck, doing… something with kindling and fire starter. Jack watches with a dubiously raised eyebrow for a moment, before catching sight of Bozer out of the corner of his eye. What he sees on the young man's face instantly grips his attention, all activity outside put out of his mind in favor of what's going on in front of him.

The moment the back door slid closed, separating them from Mac and Riley and muffling their voices beyond comprehension, something in Bozer's face had changed. His casual, bemused smile is gone, and he's looking right at Jack with an intensity that feels like it's making the air in the room thinner, just a little harder to breathe. It's deeply unnerving, and before Jack can ask what's going on, because it clearly isn't an actual concern about Riley's ability to safely light a fire, Bozer speaks, cutting him off.

"I know you don't work for a think tank."

Jack's breath catches entirely in his chest, his blood running cold. The assertion is firm and unyielding, crashing down onto the mood of the night like an anvil. He's completely sure about this - and he's right. But he's not supposed to know that. Again, before Jack can speak, needing to gather his wits about him after being blindsided with the last thing he'd expected Bozer to say, he goes on.

"I don't know what the hell it is you actually do," he says, words swift and hard, like he's been thinking about this for a while, and now that it's started to come out, there's no stopping it, "and I'll tell you right now I am _not_ happy I'm being lied to on the daily about… just about everything. But that's not what I need you to understand right now."

"And what is that?" Jack asks, finally getting his act together enough to speak. This was not supposed to happen. He'd assumed James' vague picture of Mac's roommate as some clueless kid without the attention span to piece together anything important was probably not entirely accurate, but he wasn't expecting to be confronted the instant they had a moment alone together. He's spent his entire career honing his ability to predict someone's next move - indeed this skill has kept him alive year in and year out - but for once, he has no idea what this kid is about to do next. To say it's a disconcerting feeling is a massive understatement.

"You're his security detail, bodyguard, whatever, at least that's the version I've got. Is that basically what you do?"

Wordlessly, Jack nods.

Bozer nods back, shooting a glance outside as if he's verifying they can continue at least for the moment to have a private conversation. He turns back, looking resolute in his decision to keep going, though for the first time, Jack catches a glimpse of an undercurrent of nerves. And, really, it makes sense for him to be nervous. Objectively, he's a young man in his early twenties who is by and large living an average life, who has cornered and is confronting a trained, dangerous man who does some mysterious job he knows he's being lied to about. It must be important, if he's willing to do that.

"I need you to promise me you're gonna do your job and keep him safe," Bozer says, just a hair of a waver in the firm confidence of his voice. It makes the command sound just this side of desperate, like it's an order and a plea at the same time. "He's my best friend. He's my family. I need you to make sure he comes home, okay? Because he's never gonna be half as careful as he needs to be. So you need to be twice as careful to make up for it, do you get that? You need to _watch out_ for him. I need you to _promise_ me you're going to, because _whatever_ you two are involved in, I know it's dangerous, and I have a feeling it's getting worse."

Jack is, again, struck speechless. He has the sudden, sharp thought that the nerve it takes to have this conversation is not the kind of nerve he would've had at twenty-three. Jack has more respect for Wilt Bozer right now, ten minutes after meeting him, than he has for James MacGyver after eight months of working for the man.

"I promise you," Jack says, trying to sound as steady and reliable as possible, meeting Bozer's eyes head-on, "I will do everything in my power to make sure he makes it home. I _promise."_

For a few more moments, Bozer stares at him, scrutinizing Jack in a way that makes him feel like he's being evaluated for something. Whatever it is Bozer was looking for, he must find it, because his posture relaxes and he looks away. He walks over to the fridge and starts putting sodas and beers into a small cooler to bring outside.

"Y'know," he says as he works, voice gone quieter, all trace of demand or confrontation gone, "I've seen him go through a lot of… whatever you are. Security details or whatever James makes him call you when he talks to me. This is the first time in a long time I'm not nervous every minute he's out of this house. The way he talks about you, the things I've heard, I dunno. It sounds like you might be the best thing that's happened to him in years. Whatever it is you guys do." Bozer closes the fridge and notices the expression on Jack's face, defensively asking, "What?"

"You're a lot smarter than he gives you credit for, aren't you. James, I mean," he elaborates, when Bozer looks more confused.

At the clarification, Bozer snorts, and the amount of contempt in the sound is a little jarring.

"Most people usually are," he says, shutting the lid of the cooler with more force than is strictly necessary.

Watching him, taking in the look on his face coupled with the tone of his voice and the derisive snort, Jack feels like he's just learned quite a lot. Not about Bozer, necessarily, but about James instead. This whole day is turning out to be very illuminating. If Bozer, who just stood in his living room, practically shaking with nerves, and used the fact that he has completely on his own worked out that there's a massive lie happening under his nose to order a man he's never met before to keep his roommate safe, has that much venom in him for that roommate's father? Something is definitely very wrong.

Jack already knew that, of course. But with every nail driven into the coffin that is his regard for his boss, he gets more sure that soon it's going to tip over from something he knows into something he can't stand any longer, and needs to do something about. When that time comes, though, at least now he feels reasonably certain that he's going to have someone else on his side, if Bozer's dislike of him is anywhere near as strong as it seems.

As Jack walks out to join Riley and Mac on the back patio, Bozer takes a moment to just lean against the closed door of the fridge and catch his breath. His heart still feels like it's thundering eighty miles an hour in his chest, and it's a miracle he hadn't stuttered or stumbled at all during what he had to say to Jack.

It was the sort of thing he'd never said to any of the previous people Mac had worked with, the ones that made it eventually to the house to meet him in the first place. Most of them had come and gone before that, or been far from the sort of people you want in your living room talking to your roommate. Even of the ones he'd met though, barring Mac's first partner, none of them had been like this. There's a way Mac talks about him, a trust Bozer barely recognizes in his cagey friend, that gives him a good feeling about the man, and that coupled with the by now numerous he supposes highly edited stories of Jack fishing them both out of trouble had prompted him to finally speak. To confess what he's known for a while now - that the think tank story doesn't hold water any more than a fishing net does, and he's done standing by while Mac walks out the door every day into god knows what.

Without being able to actually do anything, and without being willing to confront Mac about it directly, at least not yet, Bozer had settled for ensuring that at least the person responsible for keeping Mac alive knew that there was someone watching _him._ That much at least was within his ability. Jack had taken it pretty well, all things considered, and now all Bozer needs to do is convince his nervous system he wasn't actually about to die, and they could all get on with their night.

"Pretty nice place you got here for a couple of young guys like yourselves, how'd you find it?"

Jack asks the question after dinner, while they all sit around the fire, contentedly and tiredly chatting about nothing much in particular. Bozer winces, wondering what Mac is going to say in answer to that - he's certainly not going to take the lead on that particular story. To his surprise, what Mac actually ends up saying is… Well.

The truth.

"It was my grandfather's house, actually." Mac is looking at the fire, an old-fashioned glass soda bottle dangling loosely from the fingers of one hand. He isn't looking at Jack, or Bozer or Riley for that matter, but neither is he hesitating, telling the story Bozer hasn't seen him willingly talk about in years. "He left it to me in his will, when he died. I spent a lot of time here growing up, guess it already felt like home."

For a moment it seems like that's where it's going to stop, and Bozer would understand if it did. Even that much is hard for him to talk about, never mind the rest of it, the context of how Harry's death led directly to first Mac moving in and then Bozer himself. It doesn't.

"He died when I was nineteen," Mac continues. He's picking at the label on the bottle now, thumbnail catching over the damp paper bearing the name of the soda company until a long strip tears straight through the center of it. He doesn't seem to notice, continuing to scrape around the edges, certainly not looking anyone in the eye. Bozer is so surprised he couldn't bring himself to interrupt even if he'd wanted to. "I was devastated. He did a lot of work raising me, he was a massive part of his life. And the night before his funeral, my dad and I had a massive fight. I wanted to join the army, like my grandfather had done, I wanted to help people in a way that mattered. EOD. I was in school, though, and dad said over his dead body was I not going to graduate, and we ended up screaming at each other for more than an hour, so I left and spent the night here, and it just… stuck. I've lived here ever since."

Silence hangs over the back porch, and Bozer can see Mac start to regret it, sharing what he'd allowed out into the open for Jack and Riley to see. It seems like he's almost ready to get up and go back inside, flee the remnants of what he's told them like he never should've done it in the first place, when Jack speaks up.

"Well, it's a beautiful house," he says, like this is a normal conversation. Like any of this at all is normal. "I can see why you'd want to stay here."

Mac smiles, faint and distant, like he's still caught in the past, and the conversation moves on. Riley talks about her new neighbors, the ones across the hall with the new baby and her luckily pretty soundproof walls, but Bozer's mind is stuck somewhere else, likely the same place Mac's is.

The days immediately following Mac's grandfather's death had been some of the toughest Bozer has ever seen him through. He'd gotten the phone call while home with his parents, some hour, forty-five minutes away from where Mac lived in Los Angeles with his father. The news of Harry MacGyver's passing hit him hard, as he remembered many a weekend spent at the man's house, always staying there rather than with James when he and Mac had sleepovers as children. He'd probably seen more of Harry than he had of James the entire time they were in school together, especially after the disappearing act James pulled when they were ten.

He'd gone down the day Harry died, and then gone home, at the urging of his parents to let Mac and James make arrangements together, grieve as a family. Bozer hadn't felt quite right about it, something telling him he should've stayed, and then he'd gotten that second phone call. The one where he could barely make any words out around Mac's choked, sobbing breaths, and though it was already eleven-thirty at night he'd told his parents he had to go, gotten in his car, and drove straight to Harry's old house. Mac was on the deck in the back, collapsed over by the railing, his phone still in his hands, and they'd sat there together until nearly two in the morning, Bozer sure that were it not for his arms, holding Mac tight to his chest, his best friend may have shaken right apart at the seams.

Following that had been long, terrible days of wandering around in the house on autopilot, trying to figure out what to do with Harry's things. Bozer remembers those days, but more than the days, he remembers the long, terrible nights in the beginning. He remembers laying on his back in the dark with Mac curled tightly in on himself next to him, remembers sleeping with a hand extended carefully across the space between them to rest, palm warm and steady, over Mac's side. Eventually they'd cleared out the study and turned it into a bedroom, officially moving in together mostly by default when they realized neither of them actually wanted him to leave, but for a week or so, they'd slept side by side, and Bozer had hoped that it was enough to keep Mac afloat.

Grief and Bozer were old, familiar friends. He'd spent years feeling loss around his shoulders like a heavy, woolen blanket, pulling at his ankles like cinderblocks tied to them. It was a large part of why he'd been so adamant with Jack earlier - he knows what losing a brother felt like, and doesn't think he could bear to have his life and his soul so violently ripped apart a second time. He'd barely survived the first. It had made him uniquely suited to being around someone devastated by loss, but there was still a part of the equation that was unknown territory, that Bozer didn't know the first thing to say about and couldn't empathize with at all. James.

Mac been in as much pain as a person could be in losing what had essentially been a parent. He'd been grief stricken and so had James, he supposed, so of course he dealt with it like he dealt with all personal trouble - shutting himself off and away, especially from his son. The few times Mac and James spoke over those first few weeks were brief and explosive, always ending with Mac shutting his phone off and throwing it onto the couch, locking himself in his room and refusing to come out for hours. The army thing came up again and again, even after Mac had dropped it completely, James demanding loudly enough for Bozer to hear it from the other side of the room why his son insisted on being so selfish, on trying to hurt him like this right after his own father had just passed away.

Any amount of sympathy Bozer had for James disappeared in that moment. It hasn't come back since. Not that there had been much to begin with. He'd been just as unpleasant when they'd been kids as he was now.

Shaking his head, Bozer tries to clear his mind of grief and pain and nights spent laying there in silence while Mac sat next to him, shaking and trying to cry as quietly as he could. That had been years ago, and they didn't speak much of how he'd come to live here now. At least not until tonight, when Mac's new partner had asked about the house and Mac, for some reason, had actually answered. It's that more than anything that gave Bozer a good feeling about the man, honestly. Over the top of the fire, as Riley and Mac continue talking, Jack's eyes catch Bozer's and the two of them look at each other for a moment. Jack nods, and Bozer nods back, an understanding passing between them.

When Mac leaves for work the next day, going out into whatever terrifying unknown he can't or won't tell the truth about, Bozer feels just a little less of the anxious fear grip his chest. Wherever he's going, whatever he's doing, Jack is with him, and Bozer knows Jack is going to keep his promise.

_He'd better._


	17. Creatures of Habit

i'm not gonna lie i've been excited for this one. thank you all for your continued engagement with this fic, it's kept me excited. and now, on we go!

also i am so sorry to the entire concept of computer science and hacking because i made literally all of this up and can only hope it makes marginal sense.

(title from sleeping at last's "careful hands"

* * *

Jack's resentment of his boss is growing by the day.

Mac, Jack, and Riley are waiting in the briefing room when James arrives, ten minutes past their scheduled meeting time and looking harried and put off enough that if he didn't know any better, Jack would say _James_ been the one kept waiting. Not that he really minded the James-free down time pre-assignment. Mac had been showing him and Riley something he'd been working on down in Whittacker and Tam's lab. It was a type of earwig mic receiver that had a much longer battery life than the ones they'd been working with so far, and if you asked Jack, what the kid came up with was really impressive.

When James walks in, the conversation dies pretty much immediately. Riley had been in the middle of asking a question about cross-channel interference when the door opened and her voice cut off as soon as she registered who was walking in. Jack watches her rather than their boss, and takes note of the way her eyes track James across the room, clocking his sour expression, the stack of folders tucked under one arm, the hand still finishing up a text message or email on his phone. From the look of her, Riley isn't any fonder of James than Jack is, and that's pretty impressive, given the very small amount of time for which she's known him. Some people, Jack supposes, just make an impression.

James wastes no time in getting the briefing started, throwing up a map of Budapest onto the screens on the wall. Much like their map of Rio, there's a section that's been circled and enlarged in the next image. He talks for a short time about the area they'd be going into itself, a gathering of smaller houses near the outskirts of the city, near a national park, before cutting himself off, attention zeroed in on Mac, standing to the left of Jack and Riley.

"I'm sorry," he says, in a tone indicating he isn't sorry in the slightest, "Angus what are you _fussing_ with over there?"

True enough, Mac has been twisting the earpiece around in his fingers for the duration of James' speech so far, passing the small object from hand to hand, turning it this way and that, catching a nail in the casing every so often. His hands freeze at his father's words, and after a moment of startled stillness, he holds up the small device.

"The earpiece we were talking about," he says, and even just a couple of months ago, Jack wouldn't have caught the waver in his voice, small and fleeting. "I was working on it earlier today, and-"

"And you decided hey, why not break it before we get the chance to ever test it out?" Mac's head ducks, ashamed, but James doesn't stop, continuing with, "I don't need to be the one to remind you that you've broken equipment before by messing with it when you couldn't sit still for two minutes. Just- Just give me that. You're too smart for this, the kind of things you can build- what is the point if we end up wasting it because you couldn't focus?"

"Sorry." It's mumbled and nearly inaudible, as Mac places the device into James' hand.

James studies it for a moment, and Jack wants to, in a fleeting impulse, take the thing and break it himself, take out his phone and hurl it at the display screens to shatter one of them, anything just to get James' attention off Mac. He manages to contain the impulse and grits his teeth. Next to him, he can practically feel the tension radiating off of Riley in waves, and he takes a small half step over, just enough to put her barely behind his right shoulder. Putting himself between her and James. There's no logical explanation for why he does it, but he doesn't really have the energy to waste interrogating his impulses at the moment, and he could swear she relaxes just a fraction when he does it.

Once James seems to be satisfied with whatever it was he was looking for, he tucks the tech into his pants pocket, and clears his throat. At least now they can get back to-

"Oh for- _Honestly,_ Angus, that's just not professional. Is something going on? Do you have some appointment you're late to?"

A glance once more to the side lands Jack's eyes on Mac's fingers where had been messing with the zipper of his jacket, now stopped rigid and still under the admonishment. Jack can't take it this time, and the words come out of him before he can stop them - and that's if he would've tried to stop them at all. At this point, it's hard to say. Enough got to be enough, he supposed.

"He's not hurting anyone, can't you give it a rest?"

Never mind a pin. If a hair had dropped in that room, you could've heard it, that's how silent it went. The earlier goal of getting James' attention off of Mac seems to have worked, at least, since he is now standing there, mouth pressed into a hard line, looking half incredulous and half royally pissed, staring straight at Jack.

"Excuse me?" he says after a while with the kind of delicate quiet that comes from very powerful men when someone subordinate to them has acted in such an unexpected way that they can hardly wrap their minds around it. "I'm sorry," there it is again, he's quickly ruining the phrase for Jack, "do you want to _repeat_ that, Dalton? Because I could've sworn you just told me to…" James stops, shaking his head once, looking like he just bit into something disgusting and unexpected. "To 'give it a rest'."

"That's what I said," Jack confirms, fire still burning bright in his chest where it was kindled by one time too many seeing James snap at Mac for absolutely no good reason at all. "He wasn't hurting anything or distracting anyone, he's just fidgeting. I don't see what's worth yellin' at him over it."

"I'll say what is and isn't an issue around here," James says after a moment, still in that fragile, spun-glass calm. "And I'll tell you what is most definitely an issue, is your tone with me right now. You'll remember I'm the Director of this organization or you'll walk out the door, do you understand me?"

Pushing the issue isn't going to help anybody. Not Jack and definitely not Mac, especially since Jack doesn't have a moment's trouble believing James would follow through on the threat. It was worth risking the threat of firing, but if he continues to stand up for Mac right now, he'll actually _be_ fired, and likely Riley with him, and who will stand up for the kid then?

"I apologize, sir," Jack says, doing his best to keep his voice at marginally sincere. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Please, try to."

With those words, a final, biting snap that broke away from the icy, quiet chill of his reprimand, James turns back to his briefing presentation and begins talking about their entry point, to the South of the city. As he talks, Jack, already familiar with the area thanks to an assignment he'd been on three jobs ago, looks over to where Mac is standing, having said not a word since his initial explanation and handing over of the ear mic. To his surprise, they make eye contact, as Mac was looking over at him too.

The kid looks surprised. His eyebrows are slightly raised, mouth slightly open in a question he doesn't give actual voice to, and his hands have fallen, distracted, to his sides. Maybe surprised isn't even the right word, it's more like puzzled. Mac looks puzzled, and intrigued, like he's encountered a data set he wasn't expecting, a new reaction he wasn't prepared for when he combined chemicals down in R and D. It reminds Jack that, no matter that he'd gotten shut down, no matter that he'd given in and apologized to his arrogant jackass of a boss, no matter that he'd walked it back, that didn't mean what he'd done hadn't made any kind of an impact. Because no matter what, Mac had seen him do it.

Mac had seen somebody decide 'no, that's enough' and try and step in. Mac had heard somebody speak up for him, and tell James no, actually, that isn't a reasonable criticism. Most of all he had heard somebody, somebody Jack at least hoped he was learning to trust and listen to, say that there was nothing wrong with him. Because really, there wasn't. For whatever reason he'd been fidgeting - restlessness, nerves, Jack highly suspected ADHD - it wasn't causing anyone any harm, and James had no reason to publicly humiliate him for it. And if, just for once in his life, Mac got to hear somebody point that out, then it was worth Jack risking bringing James' anger down on himself to make that happen.

One day, maybe they'll even get to the point where Jack can bring himself to say these things directly, and Mac can bring himself to hear them and not take off running.

Their mission to Hungary, to the outskirts of Budapest's city center, has a fairly simple focus. There's an asset there, an engineer hiding out in a cabin near the forest, who needs to be retrieved and brought back to North America. She's actually Canadian, but made contact with an American diplomat outside the consulate in Hungary, passing along a message that she needed to be removed from the country, as she had information that put her life in danger if she stayed. She wouldn't disclose what that information was, but she'd said enough to get the attention of the diplomat, who'd reached out through his own contacts. And now here they are, having tracked down her location and gotten a message to her that they were coming the next day, ready to go and get her.

On the plane, Jack keeps the edge of his attention on Mac's hands. What he sees is what he had a suspicion he was going to see - every few moments, they'll drift to the arm rest of his chair, or the edge of his briefing packet, or back to the zipper of his jacket, only to snap away the moment he realizes what he's doing. It's hard to watch, the way he so sharply prohibits himself from indulging in that kind of harmless, instinctive movement, shutting down and trying to turn off or carve out something that Jack has come to see as just a part of him. Mac fidgets. It's part of who he is.

As casually as he possibly can, Jack reaches into his jacket pocket, pulling out a small piece of metal. He'd found it earlier, as they'd been leaving DXS, hands shoved into his jeans pockets to keep anyone from seeing the irritated fists they'd been bunched into since his admonishment by James. It was probably pulled from his briefing packet, though he can't remember consciously having done it, and finding it gave him an idea. Now that the moment is upon him, he slides into the seat next to Mac's and holds the object up, offering it to his partner.

Both Mac next to him, and Riley across from them, raise their eyebrows at him, and Jack says, defensively, "What?"

"Why are you trying to give me a paperclip?" Mac asks, and Jack shrugs.

"I mean… Y'know. Thought maybe it'd give you something to do with your hands. Long flight, gets boring." _Try and teach you it's okay to just let yourself fidget without your dad breathing down your neck about it._

For a moment, it doesn't seem like it's going to work. Mac is eyeing the paperclip like it might be somehow boobytrapped, and Jack can feel Riley's curious eyes boring into the side of his head. She's got an expression on like at the same time that Mac is evaluating the paperclip, she's evaluating him. Jack hopes that whatever she sees, it's good. The paperclip at least seems to pass Mac's test, because eventually, with cautious fingers, he reaches out and takes it.

"So," Jack says, clapping his palms down on his thighs, distracting from where Mac is turning the paperclip over between his thumb and forefinger, delicately, like he might break it. "About this security, then?"

"Right," Riley says quickly, when she realizes what's happening. "Security around our engineer's house."

There's a moment of understanding passed between her and Jack, and it feels pretty good to realize it's happening, that for maybe the second time after their dinner night with Mac and Bozer, they're on the same page.

Dr. Libby Parker is a woman who, at least on paper, reminds Jack very much of Mac. Her house, at least from the somewhat distanced surveillance they'd been able to conduct on her rather isolated cabin, was very well guarded. She's obviously frightened of someone - or multiple someones - if the way she's tricked out the land around her house is any indication. None of it was purchased directly from home security providers, but rather cobbled together herself, as none of it was quite anything their surveilling team had encountered before. A lot of it was very much similar to things they'd seen before, but with enough of a homemade twist that made this a job for Mac, Jack, and Riley rather than the recon team itself.

As they go over their plan of approach to Dr. Parker's house, Jack sneaks a glance every now and then over to the side, at Mac. Just as he'd hoped, the kid has started twisting the paperclip, unfolding it out into its full length as they discuss the best way to go about getting up to the house itself. By the time they've settled on a vantage point to set up temporary camp and gone over the site for exfil when they've finished, he's twisted it into a shape of some kind. And, on top of that, it's just about the most focused Jack has ever seen him sitting on the plane en route to their mission's location.

They land without incident. When Mac gets up and heads towards the front of the plane to disembark, Jack glances to the side and notices the paperclip - or what had once been the paperclip. It's laying, forgotten, in Mac's seat, crudely twisted into some kind of angled curl that could have been a spiral with more time and attention. He picks it up without really thinking about it, sticking it back in the pocket it came out of when it had been in its original form, and follows Mac and Riley down off the plane.

The cabin currently housing Dr. Libby Parker is exactly as well fortified as they were warned it was going to be. Mac crouches in the treeline at the crest of a hill overlooking the cabin, looking down over it. The river Danube curves through the city in the distance, visible through the smoke plumes rising from a factory. It's a cold December in Budapest this year, and he shivers a little, drawing his outer jacket tighter around his body and tugging at his hat, looking away from the city and back to their objective. Even from this far away, he can tell that even getting close to the cabin, never mind entering it, is going to be quite a feat.

"So, how exactly is this supposed to work?" It's a fair question from Riley, somewhere to Mac's left. He glances over at her, then looks back down at the cabin, letting Jack answer her question while he focused on the task at hand. "What's our plan?"

"We break in," is Jack's succinct answer, and Mac cringes. He'd like to be able to qualify that somehow, but really, that is the long and short of it.

"Break in," Riley repeats. "That's our whole plan, is just… Walk up to the house of a freaked out wizard of an engineer who for all intents and purposes seems to be Mac in another life and just. Break in."

Mac sits back, stowing the small pair of binoculars he'd been using to scrutinize the baseboards of the front porch, and turning to look at his teammates. "That's what our orders are. If we had a better option, that's what we'd do, but she's not gonna answer the phone, and if we just knock on the front door she'll probably blow us away, we know she's got a registered shotgun at least, maybe more. We know she's afraid for her life, and it sounds like she's got a pretty good reason to be."

One of the papers in the briefing folder had been a picture of Dr. Parker's car. Or, there had been a picture of at least what used to be Dr. Parker's car, before it had exploded in the middle of the day outside the last apartment she'd lived in, in Budapest's ninth district. The official police report said faulty gas line, but Mac has seen the pictures. Fuel-line related explosions don't look like that - homemade explosives rigged under the hood of someone's car do.

"Do you have one?"

"One what?" Riley asks, countering Jack's sudden question with one of her own. There's a wary hesitation in her voice, like she thinks she might be walking into a trick, brow furrowed.

The frown only deepens when Jack clarifies, saying, "A better option. You made a face when Mac said we didn't have one. Do you have one?"

There's a pause, and in it, Riley seems to be debating whether or not to answer. Mac can't blame her. There's no way in hell he'd answer a question like that.

"Actually, yeah. I do."

Mac finds himself holding his breath, waiting for Jack's response. When all the man does is sit back on his heels and gesture, telling her, "We're all ears," it feels like a hand lifts from his throat, and, in the immediate aftermath of being able to breathe again, Mac feels really stupid.

This is Jack. This isn't James. The difference has been carving itself out by increments for months now, closer to a year than he'd ever thought they'd get. He should've known better than to expect a James response - he isn't here. Jack is.

Belatedly, Mac realizes with a start that Riley is looking at him, waiting for double confirmation that her take is welcome. She's waiting for his go-ahead before she gives what her 'better option' is, and something about that makes M feel strange and crawly inside.

"Yeah, please, go for it," he says quickly, hoping to get the attention off him as soon as possible. It works, because Riley then explains her extremely simple idea in one short sentence.

"We talk to her first, and _then_ we break in."

"We can't talk to her," Jack points out. "Like Mac said earlier, she's not gonna answer the phone. We know because we've been trying to reach her but the recon team found her phone in like, six hundred pieces in a ditch."

"There are other ways to talk to somebody. I know some of 'em, and maybe one could work. It's worth a shot at least, right?" She looks from Jack, to Mac, then back again, and pushes on, any trace of hesitance now replaced by determination. "Listen, she's an engineer, but not a computer engineer. I'm sure her network defenses are good, but not as good as I am, and if I can break through them, I can talk to her that way. She may have destroyed her phone, but she's still got to have a computer in there, and if it's on, that's our way in. If she doesn't answer, and it doesn't work, and you guys decide it's taken too long, we'll go with the original plan but…"

Riley trails off and shrugs, excited explanation of her idea petering out into something almost shy. Next to him, Jack looks as impressed and thoughtful as Mac feels.

"I want to at least try," Riley says. "Poor woman's probably scared enough as it is. I'm sure she won't just, like, _believe_ me when I tell her who we are and that we're here to get her out, but if we can at least _try_ to calm her down a little bit, maybe she'll be less scared when we actually make it into the house. Or at least be a little less likely to load us full of buckshot or whatever, right?"

"And you can do that with what you have here?" Mac asks, sitting up straighter and gesturing back at the car parked some fifteen feet behind, hidden in the trees and scrub. Riley nods.

"I've got my rig in my bag in the car, I've got what's basically a second, hyper-powered external battery that'll give me enough life to work for two days without a charger. Give me a chance to at least try?"

An agreement sits in the back of Mac's throat, ready to get on board with the new plan immediately. On an impulse, before he speaks, he glances sideways at Jack, searching for an indication of… something. Jack's already nodding, and so Mac turns back and nods too, relieved to be on the same page.

"It was gonna take forever already," Mac says, which is true. Dr. Parker's cabin is pretty shored up, at least from what he can see. "While you work on the network I can start with what I can see and plan an approach angle. Let's do it."

"Alright," Riley says, breaking into a relieved and verging-on-excited grin. "I'll go get started." She hops nimbly to her feet and starts back towards the car.

James would hate this. They're deviating from the strategy, first of all, and they're risking a significant time delay for what mostly amounts to doing everything they can not to further scare an already terrified civilian. Sure, it's in the name of their own safety, too, but not significantly enough that James would care.

If he'd been here with his former partner O'Reilly, the man would've already charged down there and kicked the door in, if he'd been here with his partner before that, Cassandra Hall, she'd have already been on the phone reporting back to James of the insubordinate-waste-of-time, exactly-what-he'd-signed-up-for plan he'd just agreed to. But no. Riley is about to work for hours to break into a network to reach out to a woman who was probably not even going to listen, just to _try_ to put her at ease, and Jack is standing next to him, just as bought into the plan as he is.

For the first time in a long time, he's exactly where he's supposed to be, and there's no one he'd rather be with.


	18. Give It A Name (It's Already Won)

i am... so sorry for the length of this chapter lskdjfslf. thank you for your continued support, i hope you enjoy the chapter!

(title from bastille's song 'the silence')

* * *

For the fifth time in the last three hours, Mac wonders why, exactly, they still insist on conducting ops in the months of November to February in places where temperatures went below forty degrees. He's spent the better part of the day well into the afternoon circling in a wide perimeter around the cabin where Dr. Libby Parker is holed up, hiding from what appeared to be harm, help, and her own shadow. Not that Mac blames the woman - she's an engineer not a combatant, and there's hardly a thing in the world scarier than knowing you're being hunted, pursued by people you can't see, who outnumber and outgun you by leaps and bounds. But it certainly does make his job more complicated that he can't just walk up to the door, or call her on her cellphone to tell her help has arrived.

So he trudges around, keeping his distance, and peers through binoculars at the cabin. It belonged to a friend of Dr. Parker's, a friend who'd died in a 'mysterious accident' not a week earlier. She'd bolted here after her car was blown up, and luckily for them, hadn't had time to get it wired with external cameras. As far as Mac can tell, the security the building had come with was pretty minimal, offering little to no difficulty. It's what hadn't been there when Dr. Parker made her panicked dash out of the city that's going to be the issue. Dr. Parker's friend must have been an odd duck, given Mac can see what he thinks is probably a half-dozen bear traps hidden in the long-ish grass, as well as some odd glinting that he can swear is tripwires, triggers for who knows what kind of defense mechanisms. It's going to be a challenge getting up to the house, cameras and traditional security or no.

Mac pulls his jacket tighter around himself, gritting his teeth against a shiver, and continues trudging through the last three-hundred or so feet of shin-high grasses at the crest of the hill towards the car parked in the treeline. As he approaches, Jack gets out of the front seat and comes to meet him.

"Make a decision yet?" Jack asks, and Mac nods.

"North-East side," he says, gesturing towards the side of the cabin facing to the left of them. "There's no windows over there, and if we keep an eye on thermals and she's in the other end of the house, she won't see us coming. Especially if we wait until nightfall." Mac shakes his head and looks away, back towards the fogged city. Hesitation sticks the words in his throat, but he clears it and forces them out anyway. This is Jack. He's going to at least listen before he dismisses Mac's concerns. "This doesn't feel right. Sneaking up on her like this."

"I know," Jack agrees, and Mac isn't as surprised by the response as he was expecting to be. "Hopefully, Riley'll get through to her, and we might be able to get her to come out on her own. Or at least let us get close enough to show her we're not gonna hurt her or anything. I don't know it'll work, not with how paranoid she is at this point, but we're gonna try."

Now that Mac's initial assessment of the perimeter has been thoroughly conducted, and the best line of approach identified in case they don't manage to get through to Dr. Parker, there's not much left that he and Jack can do. Not while Riley is still working to get through the better-than-average firewalls to remote-access the engineer's computer. In the meantime, while they wait, Mac and Jack take turns keeping watch on the cabin and the surroundings, in case Dr. Parker leaves or the people she's so afraid of decide to drop in for a surprise visit. While one of them does a circuit of the established perimeter, the other sits in the car with Riley, where, even without the engine running, it's at least sheltered from the added chill of the wind.

Jack's just returning from his latest circuit around the building, and Mac gets out, hopping from foot to foot next to the car in an effort to keep warm. It's started to get dark outside already, morning turned to afternoon turned to evening, and the coat he's wearing just doesn't feel adequate to the amount of time he's had to spend outside in the cold today.

"All's quiet on the Western front," Jack tells him, reaching the car. "And the Eastern, and the Southern, and Northern too. All's quiet on all the fronts. How's things here?"

"She's making progress," Mac says, indicating Riley, who is slumped against the door in the backseat of the car, legs flung up sideways onto the seat with her laptop balanced on her knees. "Says it won't be too much longer now, and she'll be in."

He doesn't leave for a perimeter check right away, and neither does Jack move to enter the car and shield himself from the cold. They stand together outside, near the hood of the car, looking out towards the cabin. Though the lights of the city have sparkled on one by one, shining distantly through a fog that's only grown heavier as the sun sank lower in the sky, there's no glow coming from any of the windows in the cabin. It doesn't seem like Dr. Parker has turned any of the lights on, though Mac can't guess she's likely sleeping.

They stand together in quiet, Mac eventually leaning back against the car's bonnet, half sitting on the hood. Jack follows suit, copying his recline, and he shifts closer, so they're standing shoulder to shoulder, arms lightly touching, then pressed together when Mac doesn't move. It's cold and miserable outside, but something makes Mac want to stay here, leaning against the car, feeling warmth radiating off Jack's body and a calm quiet between them. He's nearly shivering, a tremor running through him every now and then, and eventually, Jack shifts. He leans to the side away from Mac, leaving Mac wondering if he's about to leave, their odd moment broken because just like every other day of his life, he can't keep still.

That isn't what happens, though, the purpose of his movement becoming clear when Jack pulls his hand out of his pocket and reaches around Mac to rub bracingly at his far shoulder. The friction and the arm around his back wards away the worst of the cold, and Mac feels a sudden lump rise in his throat, looking questioningly at Jack.

"You're froze half to death out here," his partner grumbles, looking away but not moving his arm, keeping it wrapped around him.

Mac tries to say something in response, something snarky or dismissive, but he can't speak around the tightness in his chest, the feeling of someone's arm around him. People outside of the bubble of safety of his and Bozer's house, they don't touch him like this, don't sling a casual arm around his back to protect him from something as harmless as the elements.

"We should head in the car for a minute, give you some time to warm up before we've gotta head on down and talk to the good doctor." Jack leans back away, giving Mac the few inches of space he'd lost back. The sudden absence of the touch leaves Mac feeling unexpectedly bereft, like there's nothing he wants in this moment more than for Jack to put his arm back where it had been. He feels cold and lonely though Jack is still right there with him, and maybe it's this that prompts him to say what he says next.

"Hey." It's a sudden outburst of a word, the confluence of both the nerve and the opportunity meeting in perfect harmony. Mac needs to take the chance before he loses his nerve and talks himself out of it.

"What's on your mind?" Jack asks when a few moments pass and Mac doesn't elaborate.

Again, Mac catapults out the words before he can go back on it. He doesn't want to talk about this, but he owes it to Jack, who has been so kind to him, who has kept him safe on missions and tries to protect him even from stupid stuff like the cold. Jack, who has no way of knowing what he's getting himself into. Jack doesn't know what he put his foot in, when he decided to metaphorically step between Mac and his father over something as inconsequential as James yelling at him for fidgeting.

"What you, uh. What you said to m-" Mac catches himself a fraction of a moment before he says 'my dad', James' voice echoing in his mind, _I'm not you father right now, Angus._ "The Director. At the office. After he was, y'know."

"Yellin' at you for no good reason and generally being a hypercritical ass?"

Mac about chokes on his own breath. It's a blunt and slightly humored statement, but underneath it, Jack is angry. The small glimpse of his anger should make Mac want to run. There's an angry man next to him who is bigger, older, and stronger than him, and Mac… isn't scared. He doesn't want to run, because he's angry, but he isn't angry at _Mac_ and somehow that makes all the difference. So instead he goes on, explaining himself.

"I don't want you to think I don't appreciate what you tried to do. Because I do. Appreciate it." Mac shifts slightly against the car, a breeze causing him to shiver, hard. "Thank you, for trying. But you shouldn't do it again."

"I shouldn't," Jack repeats flatly, and Mac nods.

Instead of looking at his partner's face as he tries to find a way to explain this, he's looking down at his hands now, fingers chilled and restless. Mac wishes he had something to do with his hands. Another paperclip, maybe, like the one Jack had inexplicably handed to him on the plane.

"No, he's just…" Mac trails off, frustrated. It's impossible to explain his father to someone who doesn't understand, and Jack just can't seem to wrap his mind around James. James is complicated, and difficult, and it's too easy to make things with him sound like something they aren't. "It's too risky for you to argue with him about things like that, Jack, he has a thing about respect."

"That's rich, given the way he talks to you and all."

"_Jack!"_ The frustration rises, coming out in the snap in Mac's voice, and to his credit, Jack falls silent. "You shouldn't challenge him like that again. It's gonna- It could land you in trouble, and I know how juvenile that sounds, but I'm serious. You don't want to be in hot water with him, he already kind of doesn't like you, and I don't-" _I don't want him to get rid of you. I don't want you to go._ "You shouldn't do it again."

"I'm sorry," Jack says after a long moment. "I can't promise that. It's my job to keep you safe, and that means I'm not just gonna stand there and let somebody hurt you right in front of me."

Mac feels a cold shoot down his spine that has nothing to do with the wind. He swallows hard and manages to get out, "He didn't hurt me. He told me to stop fidgeting, he didn't hurt me."

"I saw your face, kid. He hurt you." Jack's voice is quiet and kind and for a moment, just a moment, Mac hates him for it.

He hates him for it because that gentle, insistent tone almost breaks him. Mac is suddenly struck by the damnable urge to turn and press his face into Jack's shoulder, tuck himself under Jack's arm and let the warmth of an arm holding him close and the voice speaking to him so kindly chase away this awful, bone-deep cold. And just for that instant, Mac almost gives in and acts on it.

The instant passes and Mac snaps out of it. He stands abruptly, gritting his teeth and stalking away several paces, putting distance between himself and Jack in the hope that maybe that will kill the stupid urge to hide his face in the man's shoulder even though he isn't quite sure what he'd be hiding _from._ It's stupid, and childish, and it's not Jack's problem.

"He didn't _hurt me,"_ Mac repeats, a fraction too loud, his heart pounding. His fingernails dig into his palms and he shakes his head. He doesn't need to be taken care of, he doesn't need Jack to comfort or protect him, and if he felt _hurt_ he has only himself to blame. He only ever has himself to blame. "Just- Don't antagonize him. Please."

Jack looks like he's about to say something else, but thinks better of it. It's a good thing he does, because Mac doesn't know how much more of this conversation he can take, the whole thing having gone completely off the rails almost from the jump. Instead of saying whatever it was he was going to say, Jack just nods, and that's the end of it.

Or. Not quite the end of it.

"Are you okay?"

The question knocks Mac even further off kilter and he can't help the snap in his voice when he responds, "Of course I'm _okay,_ why wouldn't I be okay?"

Before Jack can give any kind of answer, the door of the car pops open and Riley's voice interrupts.

"Guys, I'm in. We've got her."

There is absolutely no not-scary way to hack into someone's network and remote-access the desktop of their computer because you have literally no better way to communicate with them. That said, in hindsight, Riley thinks she probably could've found a better lead than, 'Don't panic, we're the good guys.' In her defense, she'd been one of the 'good guys' for maybe a month and she's still new at this sort of thing.

Now she's just got to wait for Dr. Parker to return to the computer from whatever she's doing, and notice the word processing document Riley has opened to communicate with her. With any luck, she'll be able to type out a half-decent explanation for what's going on before that happens.

Jack and Mac re-enter the car as she's midway through her second sentence. Jack drops into the driver's seat while Mac edges into the second row with her. Something about him seems off, and she shoots a suspicious glance over at Jack like he might have something to do with why. Riley shifts to the side to allow him some space, but stretches a leg out to surreptitiously knock their shins together. He responds by pressing his leg back against hers. She can feel the cold seeping in through her jeans, and he's shaking. Just a little, but she can feel it.

"You establish contact?" Jack asks, and Riley shoots him a look over the back of the seat. She almost glares at him and says something snappy in response, but reigns it in when she looks to the side and sees Mac's expression. He shakes his head just the slightest fraction, pushing his leg a little harder against hers for a moment. The message is pretty clear, quelling the protective instinct to lash out at Jack.

_Not his fault._

"I've got into her system," Riley says, refocusing on her screen. "I'm remote accessing her desktop, and I'm typing into a word processing file to try and get her to stay calm and believe we're not here to hurt her. Don't know what kind of good it's going to do, but I'm doing my best."

"Good work," Jack tells her.

The praise sounds proud, and she can't help the small spark of warmth in her chest, any more than she could help the instinctive anger when she'd thought he'd done something to upset Mac. Her emotions have been all over the place when it comes to him, since they'd abruptly crashed back into each other's lives, but as weeks wear on, she's finding them to be more positive than not. Riley doesn't know that she's necessarily happy about that, but at least for the moment, that's a problem for Riley-In-The-Future. Riley-Right-Now has to figure out how to draft a message to an already freaked out engineer and convince her not to blow them to kingdom come when they arrive to help her.

_who are you_

The sentence comes with a surprising lack of capslock or exclamation points. Riley's actually pretty impressed. That's not how she'd be typing if she returned to her computer and found a document she hadn't started herself was communicating with her.

"She's talking," Riley announces, a thrill of excitement running through her. "I've got her, she's communicating with me."

They go back and forth for a while, Riley and Dr. Parker. The conversation doesn't get very far, with Riley attempting to convince the woman that they were American agents here to get her out of Hungary before _whoever_ wanted her dead actually got here to kill her, and Dr. Parker half-convinced Riley _is_ one of them. Eventually, they come to a tenuous agreement, wherein Riley and her team will send exactly one person down to the cabin, and Dr. Parker will hold off on shooting them dead on the spot until they've at least reached the door.

"Well alright, wish me luck, I guess," Jack says immediately when Riley relays this information, moving to get out of the car.

"Hang on a second," Riley interrupts before he can actually exit the vehicle. He stops and looks back at her, obviously confused as to what the problem could possibly be at this point. "Shouldn't we talk about this for a minute?"

"Talk about what?"

"Who's gonna go down there."

Jack looks at her like she's lost her mind, but Mac is on the same page immediately. This happens often, and is a key piece of how quickly and strongly Riley has come to like him.

"It should be me," Mac says, and Jack is already shaking his head before he's hardly said it. "I should be the one we send down there."

"Now hang on a minute, if someone's gonna walk into a creepy cabin with a gun probably pointed at the other side of the door, it's gonna be me, no question."

Of the three of them, Riley has to admit that does most closely resemble his job description, though a small zing of adrenaline zips through her chest at the thought of him doing exactly that. But, despite this, there's more to consider at the moment than who is technically in charge of what roles on this team. She does computers, Jack keeps them all safe, and Mac does… everything else. And this is one of those times when the most dangerous task is part of 'everything else'.

"Riley's not field trained yet," says Mac, obviously opting to begin with the part they all already agree on.

(Though, Riley does file that 'yet' away to ask him about later, because she'd been of the impression the Director had shut down the idea of field training her from minute one. It's interesting, to say the least.)

"And just…" Mac pauses, like he's searching for a good way to put what he's about to say next. "This is a Canadian civilian engineer who is afraid for her life. She's not a threat, she's just scared, because she thinks there's a good chance we may actually be the people she's been hiding from. And if we're sending one of us out there, I mean. Look at us, out of you and me, Jack, which one of us would you see and assume was someone sent to kill you?"

He's got a really good point. Riley almost laughs, actually, looking between the two of them and contemplating this. Mac looks like a barista working his way through a philosophy degree, whereas Jack… Well. Jack doesn't look like a bathroom tile salesman, she'll leave it at that. And she can see from the look on Jack's face, illuminated through the dark by the dome light inside the car, that though he stubbornly doesn't want to concede the point, but he does understand what Mac is talking about.

"Let me go," Mac insists, when Jack doesn't immediately shut the idea down. "I can get through the precautions she's set up, I've been studying them all day. If she was just going to shoot me on sight, she wouldn't have talked to Riley at all."

Jack doesn't want to let him go. Riley can see it on his face, and she's sure Mac can too. Despite this, however, he eventually nods.

They get out of the car together, and Riley stays inside. She watches through the window at the faintly lit interaction she can see but not quite hear. They're talking about something, Jack insistently repeating himself at Mac, while Mac nods and shakes his head and nods again. He's doing something Riley doesn't understand, until she sees the object he straightens up with in his hands, moonlight glinting off the barrel. The gun that sits strapped to Mac's hip is in his hands now, and he's handing it to Jack, who tries to push it back at him, only to have Mac grow more insistent. He's not taking his gun, and Riley understands it, but she can tell Jack is uncomfortable with it. He's still uncomfortable when Mac sets off down the hill, and Jack stays standing there outside the car, watching him go with his arms tightly folded and shoulders tensed.

Eventually, he gets back into the car, and for a few long moments, he and Riley sit there silently together.

"He's gonna be fine," she finds herself saying, not entirely sure why she's saying it. "I think we got through to her pretty well, and he's smart. He can protect himself."

The fact that Jack doesn't snap at her that he already knows this, thanks, indicates that he's a lot more worried than he's letting on. He's watching out the windshield as Mac's silhouette grows smaller and fainter the farther he gets from the car, and the gun in his hands that doesn't belong to him turns over and over.

"He's gonna be fine," Riley repeats, and tries to believe it.

The fog has grown thicker now that it's night, and it's actually a very good thing for Mac that it did. As he walks slowly towards the darkened cabin, Mac shines a small flashlight sideways near the ground. The beam of light catches on the condensation hanging in the air, illuminating the tiny droplets of water, and when one of the trip-wires Dr. Parker set up crosses his path, it shines clearly amid the soft haze of the mist. He steps high and careful over them, eyes fixed on the ground to watch as well for the bear traps he saw from a distance.

It's a painstaking and nerve-wracking journey from the car to the front porch. Mac is hyper-aware of the fact that he's alone and unarmed, and if Dr. Parker decides to go back on her word to Riley and shoot him on sight, there's nothing he's going to be able to do to stop her. He can hit the dirt, sure, and he's deliberately approaching from the side of the building that has no windows from which she could see him coming, but that's far from enough to guarantee he'll reach his destiny safely.

When he eventually does, a mere few feet from the porch, a voice sounds through the heavy, rough wood of the door, shouting, "Stop!"

Mac obeys the order immediately, freezing where he stands and holding his hands up by his head, palms out towards her.

"Dr. Parker," he calls back. "My name is Angus MacGyver. I'm unarmed, I'm alone, and I'm here to help you."

"Put your hands on your head and turn around," the woman tells him, and though her voice is still muffled, he can hear how scared she is.

With his heart pounding hard in his chest, Mac does as he's told, lacing his fingers behind his head. Behind him, the door creaks open, and he closes his eyes hard for a moment. If she's going to shoot him, she's going to do it now. She doesn't. Footsteps groan across the porch, and then she's in front of him, hair a wild mess around her face, dark circles beneath her wide eyes making it very clear exactly how long it's been since she's slept.

"You don't look like any kind of government agent," Dr. Parker tells him, and Mac snorts a relieved laugh.

"Do I look like an assassin, either?" he asks, and her posture relaxes just a fraction. The moment the tension in her shoulder breaks, it's only a matter of moments before the release of the fear that's surely kept her upright the last few days loses its grip. Dr. Parker stumbles and nearly falls, Mac lunging forward to catch her by the elbow before she can hit the dirt.

"My team is just up the hill," Mac tells her. "We'll go up together, and we'll head to where my agency will pick us up, and then we can take you home. You're going to be safe, I promise, Dr. Parker." She stares at him long and hard before speaking, her voice as unsteady as her legs seem under her.

"It's Libby, Agent MacGyver. People who show up to rescue me get to call me Libby."

"Alright, Libby. Only if you agree to call me Mac, okay?"

They turn and head up the hill together. Despite the success of their mission, Mac can't help but feel his phone, burning a hole in his pocket. He can't forget the part of their orders that had applied only to him, the words James had pulled him aside and said before they'd boarded the plane. After all, they hadn't come here to get Dr. Parker- Libby, just because she'd asked the American consulate for help. The name James had spoken echoes around Mac's brain, the man they had solid intel that Libby had come into contact with at some point during her stint in Hungary.

Jonah Walsh.


	19. The Darkness Gets Bigger

one more chapter until legit one of my favorite portions of this entire thing, perhaps my absolute favorite of all. i'm so jazzed.

it's been a while since i plugged my tumblr too so - come hang out with me at altschmerzes, i liveblog my writing sometimes, post chapter edits, and generally mess about. it's great fun.

chap title is from fall out boy's 'miss missing you'.

* * *

Exfil is late. Or, it seems like exfil is late, until Jack makes contact with DXS HQ, and it becomes clear that the problem is less that they're _late_ and more that they're just… not here. They've arrived at the designated location with an exhausted Dr. Parker and a unanimous desire to get home as quickly as possible, only for there to be no one in sight. Jack frowns around at the empty clearing, perfect for a helicopter landing, and tries to figure out if he's the one who got the location wrong, or if their exfil team did, because he definitely texted the randomly generated encrypted number assigned to exfil for this mission. In theory, contacting this number within their window should've immediately sent exfil to the determined location, and they'd likely be waiting there when the team arrived, or would be there within minutes.

It's been twenty minutes, and neither the sound of an approaching chopper nor the encrypted line going off with some kind of communication has given Jack any indication anyone is coming for them at all. He's been pacing outside for the last ten, trying to keep warm while watching out for their backup to arrive. Mac and Riley are sitting in the car with Dr. Parker, trying to convince her to close her eyes to get some rest. It isn't working.

At minute thirty, Jack texts the encrypted number, and gets no answer.

At minute thirty-five, Jack calls it, and gets no answer.

At minute forty-five, Jack calls Matty.

"Where," he says into the phone when she picks up, keeping his voice low and even so as to avoid alarming his young teammates or the highly stressed out engineer in the car, "the _hell_ is exfil, Matty? Did something happen?"

There's a beat of extremely unnerving silence, after which Matty says, "I'm going to call you right back, hold on," and the line goes completely dead.

"Thank you for that, thank you so much, it was so helpful," Jack says into the empty air. He glances over his shoulder to see Mac staring out the window away from him, on the other side of the car, Riley speaking to Dr. Parker. Frustration and anxiety thrum in his chest, and doesn't settle down until the phone rings in his hand. He answers it immediately, with the feeling that the headache he's developing is only about to grow.

Almost an hour to the minute after they'd arrived to the exfil pick-up site, Matty informs him of the problem, which is, as he'd grown to suspect, that exfil isn't late so much as they're not coming. At least not the extraction team initially assigned to the mission, which is why there has been radio silence from the assigned encrypted line - since they were called off the job, or whatever happened that they weren't showing up, the number was immediately deactivated, rendering it useless. Rather than try and figure out exactly what happened with the assigned team, Matty has instead decided to find and dispatch the nearest on-call team. It would be anywhere from a couple hours, depending on if there was a free team in the area, to more than half a day, if one needed to be dispatched direct from Los Angeles.

The exfil team pulled arrives to pick them up in six hours.

"So, why is it," the very petite woman with the sharp bob haircut sitting across from Jack asks, "that whenever we get a last second emergency call because something went tits up with a planned exfil extraction, it is literally always you guys?"

"Believe me, Meredith," Jack tells maybe his favorite member of exfil team Sierra November, the woman whose Russian got them out of hot water early in his career with DXS, "I want the answer to that as much as you do."

Dr. Parker still doesn't sleep on the flight home. The last Jack sees of her, she's being escorted down a hallway in DXS, to a debriefing room. He hopes, at the very least, they'll let her take a nap somewhere before they really get into it.

"So, one catnap at home later, and here I am," Jack says as he finishes recounting the whole story to Matty. "Your turn. What the hell happened with the exfil team?"

The two of them are sitting in her office, mutually filling each other in on their end of exactly what had gone wrong in the last hours of the mission to Budapest. Jack's looking forward to hearing whatever she'd managed to find out, even if it's unlikely to be anything good. He'll take a bad answer over no answer at this point, and it's not as if he doesn't already know full well something very hinky is going on around here.

"The team that was initially assigned to you was Yankee Juliet," Matty says, and her face is drawn into a pinched, displeased frown. "Apparently, from what I've been able to glean talking to the exfil Department Chief, they were given an extremely tight window and promised you would be there within that window. The window was about ten to twelve hours, and you took almost twenty to get Dr. Parker and start heading for the extraction site. Yankee Juliet had to leave before you were finished as they were dispatched to another agent needing retrieval. They were double booked, I guess, supposed to get you and then Agent Li on the way home."

"Ten to twelve hours," Jack repeats, and Matty's frown sours even further.

"I don't like it either," she tells him. "And I think I know who we have to thank for it. I'm told the person who delivered the instructions to the exfil department regarding the pickup times was the Director's assistant."

"Warren? They got their orders from _Warren?_ Since when does _Warren_ tell anybody what to do?" Director MacGyver's executive assistant Anthony Warren is one of the most bland and irritating people Jack has ever had the displeasure of meeting. He's only interacted with the pale, sullen young man a few times, each of those times because the Director had some message or instruction for them but not enough time to deliver it himself. As he ponders this, Jack comes to an understanding of what happened at approximately the same time as Matty explains it.

"He often sends Warren to liaise with exfil for him. Warren didn't make any of the decisions, he was just repeating what the Director told him, but I'm concerned he sometimes loses things in translation. Just one more thing I'll need to look into on my end, I suppose."

Matty sounds exhausted, and for what is maybe, Jack realizes with some amount of guilt, the first time, he takes a moment to account for how tiring this must be for her. Not only is she attempting to function normally in her capacity as the Deputy Director of an agency that was barely above water when she'd arrived to it, which is already a serious undertaking, she's managing a secret investigation into her own boss, in an attempt to figure out if she needs to stage a coup on top of everything else she's dealing with. However frustrating and stressful the investigation into the Director has been for Jack, it's been infinitely more complicated, even just from a logistical standpoint, for Matty.

"Let me know if there's anything I can do to help you," he says, meaning it earnestly. He gets the impression she understands it's more than just a platitude when she flashes him a quick, strained, but nevertheless genuine smile.

"Thank you, Jack, I'll keep you in the loop." The use of his first name is another clue towards exactly how crucial it is that he's in this with her, a hundred percent. "Was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about regarding your mission in Hungary?"

"Yeah, actually." It's been gnawing at him since he'd seen it happen, and Jack jumps at the opportunity to run the odd interaction by someone else. "Something happened with Mac and Dr. Parker that felt off."

Matty waves a hand in a wordless gesture for him to go on, elaborate.

"After we confirmed that exfil was on the way and Sierra was gonna be there to get us in a couple of hours, Riley got out of the car. They were waiting inside cause it was pretty cold while I stood outside and watched for the helo, but I guess Mac asked for a minute to talk to Dr. Parker by himself. Riley didn't tell me that, but I don't know why else she would've gotten out of the car - it was _really_ cold - and she kept looking back at them."

"Could you make out any of what they were talking about?" Matty asks, frowning.

"Not really." Even the thought of it after the fact is making the back of Jack's neck prickle uncomfortably, deeply unnerved by being out of the loop on something regarding his partner. "He was showing her his phone and swiping, I caught the reflection of some photos, I think he was showing her pictures to see if she recognized any of the people in them. And before you ask, I barely caught half a glimpse of one of them, and I couldn't make out who it was."

"What did he say when you asked him about it?"

There's no question posed of whether or not Jack did ask him about it - of course he did. Jack, being employed by DXS explicitly to keep Mac safe and having grown extremely fond of the kid in the near-year they'd worked together, is thus in possession of a pretty strong professional-turned-very-personal motivation to figure out whatever is going on with him that was so important it was preoccupying him on a mission. Besides which, Jack is also an incurably nosy person, a fact he likes to blame on Sunday after Sunday at brunch with his mother and a gaggle of Southern aunties, only a solid third of which were actually related to him.

"He said it was a 'side project' and wouldn't say any more about it." Jack snorts and shakes his head, adding, "He told me not to worry about it."

"Somehow," Matty says dryly, eyebrows raised at him, "I can't imagine that's what's going to be happening."

"You're damn skippy it won't be happening," Jack shoots back, fully copping to it. "At this point? You got a greater chance of me quitting this line of work to join the circus before you'd convince me to stop worrying about him."

It's surprisingly easy to say out loud, to admit to someone else that Mac's safety has become chief in his life, and that 'safety' means far more than whether he's physically in one piece. Matty doesn't seem surprised by this either, rather seeming to be gratified to hear it. Jack finds himself wondering once again how much masterminding on her part had gone into his hiring here and why, and then immediately coming to the brand-new conclusion that he doesn't care. Whatever Matty's motivations, he's here now, and he's not going anywhere. Hell or high water, he's in this, whatever 'this' is, until the bitter end if necessary. He just hopes it won't be necessary.

"Well, just keep an eye on him about it, find out what you can when you can. What's next on the docket in the meantime?"

"We're starting Riley's training," Jack says, and can't help the grin that breaks out over his face at saying it. "We're gonna start her in the car, tailing, then do some evasion runs. Also," and this is the part where his grin fades somewhat, unsure how it's going to go over, "I think I'm going to read her into the Director problem when we have a minute away from Mac."

"You think that's a good idea?" There's nothing in the question to indicate what, if anything, Matty's existing answer is. It's a little unnerving, and Jack steels himself in his resolve.

"Yeah, I do. She's got a good head on her shoulders, she already doesn't like him, I can tell, and we need someone good with computers if we want to take this investigation next level." Jack cringes, thinking of something else. "The only hard part, I think, is going to be convincing her she can't tell Mac yet. She's not going to like that, the two of them… They hit it off immediately, didn't take but five minutes for them to get awful protective of each other. Which, don't get me wrong, is a good thing, but it's gonna make that a difficult conversation."

"Well, good luck, and call me if you need anything. I'll start putting together a folder for her when you get her read in."

Jack nods, thanks her, and takes his leave of Matty's office.

Riley is, luckily, a quick study at just about anything she's interested enough in to put her mind to. This makes explaining things to her fairly easy, and maybe ten minutes into their first under the table field training session that they have her behind the wheel, tailing Mac through suburban Los Angeles.

"So, what is it we're doing, again?" she asks, eyes fixed on Mac's car maybe three hundred feet ahead of them. He pulls a left onto a random Southbound street, and Riley speeds up a little before remembering her coaching and reducing her speed to a regular pact and taking the turn as normally as possible.

"We're tailing Mac so we can teach you how to think like someone trying to follow someone else. Means when we actually get you doing evasion, you already have a rough idea of what the guy tailing you is doing and why. If you can think like them, you're halfway there, and it's not an intuitive thing. Just gotta do it until it's part of you."

Riley nods, determined, and slides to a stop two cars behind Mac at stoplight. She's doing well, keeping her distance and trying to avoid speeding up and making herself obvious amongst the regular ebb and flow of traffic. Of course, the fact that it's LA helps, because when you're driving like a bat out of hell in Southern California, people are far more likely to assume that you're just an idiot, an asshole, or both than they are likely to assume you're tailing someone or trying to lose a tail. It's a little more obvious in more subdued places, traffic wise, but Jack can't think of a better spot to learn evasive driving.

They spend a while driving around following Mac, who isn't actively attempting to avoid the tail at all, merely acting as a random citizen with no idea someone was following him would. About two hours into the exercise, when everyone was beginning to get too bored to tolerate it any longer, they switch roles, and begin to practice some light evasion tactics. Jack explains the concept of an evasion route, or heat run as it was sometimes referred to, how to lose a tail or avoid picking one up without also endangering yourself and the rest of the people around you to the greatest degree possible.

Riley proves to be a fast and calm thinker, and she seems to enjoy the challenge, having fun with the exercise as much as she's learning from it. It's pretty clear that Mac is going fairly easy on her, but she doesn't seem to take it personally. There's no way to learn jumping straight to ten. Much better to start at a two or a three and build you way up. She actually manages to lose him completely in the early afternoon, and Jack directs her to pull into a nearby parking garage. She's sitting behind the wheel, cheeks flushed with the pride and satisfaction of a competitive victory, and Jack is not looking forward to putting a damper on her mood. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's about to happen.

"So, what next?" she asks, eyes bright and excited, and Jack hates himself for what he's about to do, just a little bit.

"We're gonna do a little hand to hand training next, just some basics, but first, there's something we need to talk about."

Incrementally, Riley's smile fades, beginning when Jack says this and continuing faster as he talks, explaining the situation with what's wrong at DXS, how they believe the Director is to blame for most of it, though they're not sure quite how deliberate or premediated any of it is. He outlines in broad strokes what they've seen so far, what led Matty to the conclusion that the problem wasn't some kind of mole in the organization, but James himself. She seems to be sobered by the revelation, but it doesn't seem to surprise her at all. In fact, she seems totally game and on board from the first moment, right up until Jack says the one thing he knows might topple it for them - the fact that Mac can't know about any of it.

"No," Riley says immediately, shaking her head to punctuate it. "No, I'm not doing that. I'm not lying to him like that. I can't believe _you're_ lying to him like that, Jack, what the hell?"

"Believe me," Jack says, though the accusation hurts, throbs in his chest like he's been struck. "_Believe_ me, Ri, if I had another choice, I would take it."

"What's coming next had better be a really good explanation why you don't have another choice. It's his _dad,_ he deserves to know."

"And it's exactly because it's his dad that we can't tell him. Think about it. We're investigating his father because he might be making the extremely dangerous and stressful job we have working under his direction a lot more dangerous and stressful in a way that's coming down on Mac harder than it's hitting anybody else. We're pretty sure there's something there, but we don't have any proof."

Jack lets it sit for a second before he continues on, and when he does, he gentles his voice, says it as kindly as possible. Because he's been thinking about this for a while.

"The instant he finds out about this, his life as he knows it goes up in smoke. Whenever we tell him - and we _will_ tell him, before it goes to the Oversight board - it's going to detonate his world and it's going to hurt like hell. How would you take it, if you were him and someone told you something like this? And if they had no proof? It's going to be devastating. I can't do that to him without proof." Jack swallows hard, throat dry, and his voice goes even softer. "I would not do this if I didn't have to. I would _not_ hurt him like this if I had another option. You know me better than that."

Riley doesn't say anything in response to that. She's looked away from Jack out the window at the dimly lit parking ramp around them. Her expression is troubled and her arms are defensively folded. It's clear as day even without words that she's not happy about this.

"You don't have to be part of this," Jack says quietly after moments have passed in long, thick silence. She deserves to have an out, and he won't hold it against her if she takes it - it's asking a lot, even without having to lie to someone he can see she's fast becoming close friends with. "Matty and I can manage, you don't need to put yourself on the line for this. If you can't stand even knowing about it, we can arrange for you to transfer to a different agency, or just discharge you from your role here, Matty will make sure you don't go back to prison."

"I'm not going anywhere." The answer is as firm as it is immediate, and Jack can't deny the relief he feels at hearing it. "I'm in. If you're taking Director MacGyver down, I'm in." She sounds mad, and he's kind of glad to hear it.

Mad means, like Jack had suspected, she already knew something was really, really wrong, even before he'd explained what he and Matty had found so far. Mad means invested. Mad means ready to fight. And they need ready to fight.

"Can you live with not telling him?" It's an important question, and Jack holds his breath to hear her answer.

"Not for a minute longer than I have to," she says, looking over at him. Her eyes bore into him and while he'd already been on the same page with regards to Mac, that they can't keep this from him any longer than is absolutely necessary to not destroy him completely, if he _had_ thought of arguing, any hint of it would be gone from his mind at the look on her face. Her expression is a fierce challenge, daring him to tell her different.

Jack nods. "Not for a second longer than is absolutely necessary," he promises, and she nods back.

"Okay then. Where do I start?"


	20. Brighter Things Than Diamonds

and here it is folks! the beginning of my favorite mission in this fic so far. i hope it lives up to whatever hype i've given it. please disregard timeline weirdness because we are cherrypicking canon at best here and doing as we please.

enjoy!

(title from the mountain goats song 'the young thousands')

* * *

Christmas and New Years come and go, the winter holidays passing without much fanfare at DXS. Riley takes the opportunity to spend the week of Hanukkah at home with her mother, and Jack himself goes home to Texas for several days to be with his parents and sisters at Christmas. He entertains for a moment the idea of asking Mac to come with him, but dismisses it fairly quickly. The kid's still so skittish, he can't imagine any kind of invitation to spend a major, generally family-oriented holiday with Jack at his childhood home was going to be met with anything but suspicion and an anxious declination of the offer.

Jack has been working on it, the way Mac holds himself at such a distance at the same time he gets the feeling the kid needs someone next to him before, one of these days, he crumbles completely. He's been spending as much time with Mac when not actively on missions as possible, making a point to make as much casual contact with him as opportunity allows for, bumping his shoulder and tapping his back to get his attention. Trying to teach him through exposure and repetition that Jack is a safe person, that there can and will be safe people in the world, in his world. It's not entirely clear what kind of an impact it's having on Mac internally, but Jack has started to notice him tentatively reaching back, and so he'll take it as a win.

The other day, Mac, completely focused on some tinkery little thing he'd been working on, thoughtlessly reached out and whacked at Jack's arm with the back of his hand to get his attention and wave him over, freezing immediately once he realized what he'd done. Jack had been as calm and nonchalant as possible, while inside he'd practically been doing cartwheels, and things had settled after a few moments. It's been different since then, something in Mac looser, less rigid and carefully wound.

They all return from their various trips over the holidays and things proceed as normal. Mac doesn't talk about what he did with his time while Jack and Riley were gone, and Jack can only hope he'd ended up spending it with Bozer's family or something. It's a better thought than imagining him alone in an empty house, or worse, alone with James. Jack doesn't push the matter, and continues with his quiet crusade to treat Mac with enough constant, persistent kindness that he stops reacting to it like he's surprised.

He's got admit it's a little frustrating, seeing how easily Riley managed to cement herself into a place in Mac's life where it's not uncommon to see them leaning over each other while reading briefing folders on the plane, having quiet conversations that stop as soon as someone else comes within earshot. It's been much longer that he's been here, and Mac still looks at him half the time like he's not sure if Jack is about to turn on him at any moment. But Jack tries to tell himself it's nothing personal, that he probably has James to thank for this more than anything else, and it's really quite a good thing that Mac and Riley have hit it off so well and so quickly.

They're circling each other at the moment, in a gym by Riley's apartment, with Jack calling coaching and instruction from the side. Riley is turning out to be just as quick a study at hand to hand as she was with tactical driving, and she's landed a couple of decent shots on Mac today.

"Remember what we talked about," Jack tells her right as she ducks, avoiding the world's least likely to actually hurt you swing Mac had just aimed at her. "Yes! Exactly. That's it. Best defense to an attack is to not be there when it lands."

Over her shoulder, Riley flashes him a quick smile. His chest puffs out a little, proud and pleased to be doing this with her. No matter how much he loves the other parts of his job, this is probably his favorite, clandestine and against orders though it may be. It's the happiest he can remember being in a long time, spending an early morning in a gym with these two kids of his.

_These two kids of his,_ he thinks again to himself and snorts, shaking his head. As if he, in any world, had any claim to either of them, any reason to look at these wonderful young people and call them 'his' in any sense. But, well, what no one else hears outside of his head can't hurt them, so Jack lets it rest for the moment and tries not to interrogate the thought any further.

Not that he's offered much of a choice, given what happens next.

When his phone rings and Jack looks at the screen, noting the caller being 'Director MacGyver', he has to close his eyes and count to three before answering it. He does this in order to calm his immediate temper upon seeing so much as the man's name and avoid doing something really unwise, like greeting his boss with something along the lines of, 'Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on, sir.'

"Dalton," he says instead, waving a hand at Riley and Mac who have stopped what they're doing and are watching him curiously.

"Where are you?"

Jack looks around the gym, past Riley and Mac, and out the window at the busy street outside. "Grocery shopping."

"Well, hurry up and finish, be at the office within the hour."

"Something come up with the job we're leaving on this afternoon?" Jack asks, waving again at Riley and Mac to keep them from asking any of the questions he can see burning in their eyes. Nothing has been explained about this job yet, only that they were to meet in the briefing room, all three of them, packed up and ready to take off on the jet by three in the afternoon.

"Yes, the timeline has been escalated by a significant amount. Just get here and be ready to go as soon as you can." With that, the Director hangs up the phone, and Jack is left wondering what he's about to walk himself into.

Within seconds, Mac's phone starts ringing, and after a much similar conversation where he claimed to be 'fixing the microwave at home', Riley was prompted by her own phone call to identify herself as 'in a pilates class'. By the end of what had to be no more than five minutes, all three of them have been summoned with an alarming degree of immediacy into the office. Jack swallows down the sense of foreboding sitting like lead in his chest and sets about getting them all home for a few minutes at least to grab a few things, then heading in.

They're barely in the building for two minutes before the Director is ushering them all outside and into an unmarked agency car. Mac is in the passenger's seat, a lap full of folders that had been dumped on him the moment he sat down, while Jack and Riley sit in the back, none of them quite sure what's going on.

"Pass those out," the Director says in a clipped voice and Mac does as he's told, handing two of the folders with their names Post-It noted to the front back to his two teammates.

Unable to help himself and not really giving a rip about whatever dramatics would lead the Director to want him to wait, Jack flips the folder open and is immediately confronted by a driver's license and a passport, both of which bear his photo and half of his name. Jack Nylander, the ID says, and craning his neck, he catches sight of Mac's fake driver's license over his shoulder.

Mac Nylander. Same last name.

Jack feels his pulse skip a beat, just for a moment, and he cannot begin to articulate how bad of an idea he thinks this is. He's been given an undercover identity that has the same rather unusual last name as Mac's and given their ages, it's a very short leap to the logical conclusion of what's going on here. He's about to go undercover as Mac's father.

There is not a single problem Jack himself has with this. He doesn't balk for a moment about pretending to be Mac's dad. It's been going on a year, which doesn't feel like long enough for this heavy ache in his chest every time Mac is in the slightest danger, every time the Director so much as looks at him harshly. But at the same time, Jack's known for a while now that he cares a lot more than he was ever supposed to. He lost the ability, somewhere along the line, to convince himself this is just a job, that _Mac_ is just a job. That it wouldn't take more than wild horses to drag him away and leave the kid with this job and a father Jack trusts with him less and less by the minute. No, Jack has no problem with this cover. It's not himself he's worried about. It's Mac.

Mac who looks at Jack like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop every time it's been long enough for him to convince himself that Jack's patience with him can't possibly last another second. Mac, who'd stood next to the car in Budapest, shivering in the cold, and resolutely insisted '_he didn't hurt me'_ in the tone of someone who had been hurting so bad for so long they couldn't hardly identify the feeling any longer.

At this point, it hasn't been nearly long enough, and Jack hasn't made nearly enough progress with Mac to make going undercover as his father to be anything but a mess in the making. Best case scenario, this is an awkward mission that sets Jack back in the progress he'd been making with Mac who knows how far. Worst case scenario, well. Hopefully it won't be the worst case scenario.

"Undercover," Jack muses out loud, glancing at Mac out of the corner of his eye. "As Mr. Nylander and his-"

"Nephew," the Director breaks in, bringing Jack's line of thought to a halt.

They've rolled to a stop at a red light, and in the moment of stillness, unable to help the impulse, Jack looks to the man, who is staring straight at him with an unreadable, hard expression on his face. There's something deliberate there, and Jack can't help but feel like he made that call, sending Jack and Mac under as uncle and nephew rather than father and son, on purpose. Jack has a few hunches as to why, but it isn't going to help anybody to get into it now.

"Right," he says back, keeping his voice neutral. "And where, exactly, are Mr. Nylander and his nephew, and uh," looking to his left, to Riley in the seat behind the driver's seat, he reads the name off the license she holds up for him, "Riley Bailen, headed to?" He squints at her license then down at his, and flips open the passport too, just for good measure. The place of birth on the passport is the same as the issuing state on the license. "Also, there a reason for the Minnesota IDs, cause-"

"Because that's where you're heading, Dalton, if you'd give me a second to _explain_ what you're headed out on before we actually _get to_ the airport."

"Airport?" Mac asks, eyes snapping up off his folder, at the same time that Jack asks, incredulous, "_Minnesota?"_

In a move that Jack deems probably wise, Riley doesn't say anything. She busies herself flipping through the rest of the papers in the file, resolutely not looking at anybody else in the car. Jack waits for the Director to elaborate, wondering with an acidic irritation if the man is making them wait on purpose, some kind of petty lesson about patience or whatever. After a pause and a moment where the Director demonstrates his displeasure with the driving of another car on the road with a loud, abrupt blast of his horn, he launches into the explanation.

As he talks, Jack's weird feeling only grows. They reach the airport, and the hurried explanation is cut off, though they're told any additional information they might need will be in the folders they were given. Any questions that may come up after that can likely be answered by the contacts they'll meet on the ground in Minnesota, a DXS agent and his handler. It doesn't feel like enough, not for what they're about to walk into, and the fact that this case has apparently been brewing for weeks without anybody but the Director being any the wiser. Personally, Jack would've preferred a heads up about… this.

Jack distractedly stands in line with Riley and Mac at LAX, where they're being forced to fly out of due to a routine flight-check discovering a problem with the altimeter of the jet they were supposed to be taking, with a timeline too tight to wait for it to be fixed when the techs thought there might have been a deeper problem. He moves forward slowly, with the line, and thinks about what they're about to walk into. What, he thinks, as he looks down at the passport he's stuck his ticket between the pages of, Jack Nylander is about to walk into.

What he's about to walk into is a separatist militia operating in the North of Minnesota, referring to themselves as 'the Northguard'. They've been in operation for years but only began cropping up in greater prominence on law enforcement radar for the last fourteen months or so, when their low-level weapons deals across the Canadian border began picking up, getting more serious in frequency and content. The Northguard smuggled arms across the border from Minnesota into Ontario through the vast swaths of forest that span the United States-Canadian border in that area.

DXS had an operative stationed with them for the last few months, working his way higher into the ranks of the small, tight-knit organization, trying to figure out exactly what they were smuggling and exactly who it was going to. It was a long-term, low-pressure assignment for a relatively low-level agent, one Curtis Hansen, until it began to heat up, at the news that there may be a new weapon coming into the camp in the next few weeks. Something serious. Something biologic, maybe. Which is almost the exact point at which a wrong move on an icy street left Agent Curtis Hansen with a broken femur, completely out of commission as far as the op went.

For the last few weeks, Agent Hansen had been working on establishing cover, under the guise of not wanting to leave the Northguard down a man, for Jack and Mac, as neighbors of his father's growing up. The story was that Jack was the oldest of the large Nylander family, born in Minnesota and living for a good portion of his childhood in Texas, explaining the accent. Then, as a young adult, he'd moved back to the Midwest, right around when his sister had her son, Mac. Now he was theoretically looking for work farther up North, having experience in the oil fields in Texas and working construction and security in the Twin Cities. Which is when his 'old neighbor Curtis' told him about an opportunity perfect for a good old, homegrown Minnesota boy looking for a job, and a place to help teach his wayward nephew the value of good, hard work.

The Northguard is waiting for them, due to arrive that night, and are paranoid at best. According to Agent Hansen, the paranoia is getting worse by the day, so risking being late is not the kind of footing they want to start off with. Which is what lands Jack here now, in LAX with Mac and Riley - whose own last-second cover identity was taking the form of Mac Nylander's girlfriend, Riley Bailen, a fact which had them both making eye contact and pulling faces at each other for the split-second the Director was distracted by traffic.

Jack is looking around, trying not to seem too nervous in the TSA line, flicking the edge of his boarding pass with his thumbnail. Behind him in line, Riley and Mac seem somewhat more at ease, joking with each other about something he hadn't caught the beginning of. It's the beginning of a very long day, and especially given the time difference between the West Coast and the Midwest, they're already running on borrowed hours. He sighs and checks his watch for maybe the fifth time in as many minutes, the second hand creeping agonizingly around the face.

By the time they make it through ten hours of flights and layovers and land in Duluth, Minnesota, a city perched in icy hills on the shore of Lake Superior, it's already dark outside. It gets dark early this time of year across the country, but something about the odd blue light cast from the city across the behemoth of a lake makes it seem darker still out here, in a state Jack has to admit he's never actually been to before. He can't say he likes it, either, from the moment they touch down on the tarmac. The land outside looks cold and distant and he doesn't understand the rows of smiling faces in front of him, seemingly so happy to be here.

It's then he remembers that Jack Dalton might not like snow, but this is the homeland of Jack Nylander, so he plasters a similar smile over his face, and tries to act like it.

"You two ready for our first big undercover job?" he asks, as they get settled into the car they'd had waiting for them at the airport. Mac nods absently, looking out the window around at the scores of cars around them, while Riley looks less sure. Jack can't say he blames her - she's only been here a few months and doesn't have nearly enough training for this. Hopefully, it'll just be a quick in-and-out, given Agent Hansen did most of the legwork for them already - no pun intended to the poor guy's busted leg.

The drive from the Duluth International Airport to the safe-house mission base of their laid-up agent and his handler is relatively short, not twenty minutes to the outskirts of the third largest city in Minnesota. To Jack, who's gotten so used to Los Angeles crowds that nothing really phases him anymore, that doesn't mean much at all, and he takes the opportunity to scope out the darkened landscape around them.

It's a very good thing that Jack has spent as much of his life as he has globetrotting in the name of international security, because it means the snow packed hard into a shell over the road's asphalt isn't really giving him trouble, driving wise. Handfuls of bundled up residents brave the streets and sidewalks around them, ducking between stores and cars in brightly colored parkas. Jack squints around at them as he drives through icy streets. Some of the trees lining the roads still have the glittering white lights usually put up around Christmastime wrapped around trunks and bare branches, though their light is dimmed by the snow that weighs down upon everything. It must have fallen during the day, because while none is actively accumulating, it lines every shoveled pathway in mounds at least a foot high, if not higher.

Makes a person shiver just to look at. It also makes Jack very, very glad that they're supposed to have sufficient winter gear ready and waiting for them at the safehouse of Agent Hansen and his handler.

"It looks like _Northern Exposure_ out there, I think that man's coat is actually a foot thick. Welcome to Cicely, Alaska, folks…" Jack mutters, then glances to the passenger's seat, hoping the joke would've diffused some of the awkward stiffness that's clung to Mac since their cover story was explained. It didn't. In fact, he looks fully mystified as to what Jack is talking about, prompting him to repeat, "Y'know. _Northern Exposure._ The show with the-" And it dawns on him. Jack shakes his head, looking back to the road. "Of course you don't know, what am I talking about. You've never seen _Northern Exposure_, you're twenty-three."

"Twenty-four."

As the car grinds to a halting stop at the red light, Jack looks back over at Mac, sure he must have heard wrong. "Sorry, what?"

"I'm twenty-four."

For a moment, as the light goes green and the car slowly picks up speed, Jack just accepts it. Okay, so he'd been wrong about Mac's age this whole time. The dossier he'd been given on the kid had the wrong information, and Matty had misspoke when they'd talked about it and- No, that couldn't be it. Why would the dossier have been misprinted? Why would Matty have been wrong about that?

"Since _when,_" Jack can't help but ask, trying to figure out what is possibly being lost in translation here, "are you twenty-four?"

Silence, during which Jack makes eye contact with Riley in the rearview mirror. She shrugs helplessly, evidently also having no idea what's going on. She probably also is wondering why he's making such a point out of it, and truthfully, Jack himself doesn't really know that either. It just unsettlingly bad, in a way he can't quite articulate, to be wrong about such basic, fundamental information about Mac.

"Since the thirteenth," Mac says, voice completely flat and increments too loud, like he'd forced it out.

"The thirteenth? As in the thirteenth of _January?_ As in," Jack does the quick math in his head, "as in not even _two weeks ago?_ Are you telling me your birthday was twelve days ago, we _missed_ your birthday, and you just…" At the conclusion of the successful turn onto a steep, quiet residential street, he takes a hand off the wheel, gesturing through the air of the car to make his point. "_Didn't say anything?"_

"Oh look," Riley interrupts before Mac, who's gone unnaturally still and is staring stiffly out the window, refusing to look at either of them, has the chance to even try to respond. "Isn't that the address the Director gave us? I think our Agent's handler is waiting for us on the porch." She opens the door and gets out of the car, and Mac follows her too fast for anything more to be said on the subject of either his age or his birthday.

_Okay, fine,_ Jack thinks, frowning and following them outside. The bitter, vindictive cold of the air nearly stops his first breath in his lungs and it takes all the calm and composure in his body not to choke on it. _But we're not done talking about this._

And they aren't. Not by a long shot.


	21. Poster Child Prodigy

[elmo with arms raised and fire in the background gif]

that's how i feel about this chapter, guys. i hope you enjoy reading it as much as i enjoyed writing it, your comments keep me going!

title this chapter is from sleeping at last's song 'neptune'

* * *

"You people must be fully nuts," are the first words out of the mouth of their contact's handler, Agent Evelyn Moua, before they'd even fully reached the porch. She's standing outside waiting for them, white knit cap pulled down low on her tawny-brown forehead, arms folded as she watches them reach the steps.

"...No? Maybe? What?" is all Jack can think to say in response. Next to him, he hears one of them, probably Riley, bite down a scoff of laughter. A gust of wind rushes down the street and Jack feels like his skin is burning, he's so cold. "Listen," he says, rather than waiting for an explanation about Agent Moua's odd first words to them, "can we do this inside please?"

The woman shrugs and steps back into the brightly lit inside of the townhouse. Jack lets Mac and Riley enter before he does, taking one last lingering look around at the street outside. The roofs of the houses glitter under the street lamps, thinly ice-crusted banks of snow lit up like the sequined leotard of a figure skater gliding around a rink. He shakes his head and looks away, trying to dismiss the feeling of being watched, that this steep, frozen place knows he doesn't belong here.

Stepping inside makes Jack's face tingle uncomfortably, breathless cold replaced by overwhelming warmth. It takes him a moment to adjust, stamping his feet on the mat inside the front door to try and encourage the pins and needles in his limbs to fade faster. It's not a large house, a small two-story in a residential neighborhood, and the inside feels as cozy as a house would need to in a place like this to keep a person from freezing over inside. Most of the trappings of the operation being run by Agents Hansen and Moua are likely hidden in the next room over, or up the narrow staircase to the far left, just in case one of the neighbors happened to see inside the door.

There's a sound from the doorway to the right of the room, and Jack looks over to see a man who must be Agent Hansen, judging by the crutches he uses to heave himself across the rug-covered floor. A large plaster cast encases just about the entirety of his right leg, and Jack winces at the sight. He ambulates using the crutches with the kind of haphazard familiarity that comes with an impossibly unwieldy task being performed by a person who's had a fair amount of practice with it. The man crosses the room decently quickly until he's within arm's reach of the newcomers, and holds out his hand to first Riley, then Mac, then finally to Jack himself.

"Agent Curtis Hansen," he says, introducing himself. "You can call me Curtis. Evelyn met you on the porch, and that's about it for our lonely little op out here. And that makes you…"

"Jack. Jack Dalton," Jack says, gesturing to himself, then out to his young teammates. "That's Mac and Riley there."

"So, you're the poor folks from California that Director MacGyver's sending way up North, huh?" There's an almost mirthful glint in Curtis's grey-blue eyes as he levers himself carefully into an overstuffed armchair.

"Absolutely not like this they're not," breaks in Evelyn, who's got her arms folded and one eyebrow arched so high it's practically disappeared under her hat. "You should see what they showed up driving, Curt, it's some shiny, new black SUV that may as well have 'government issue' stamped on the bumper." She looks over to Jack, Mac, and Riley, and waves generally at the drape-covered windows facing out at the street. "If you go up there driving that, they'll know something's up on the _spot._ People like you're supposed to be don't drive cars like that. Not up here."

Almost instantaneously upon hearing her say it, Jack feels the thumping pressure of a headache begin to build behind his eyes. She must see the look on his face, because when she continues, Evelyn's voice is softened somewhat.

"I'll figure something out. Pop upstairs, make a few calls, I think I can find something for you." With that she disappears, the creaking of her footsteps echoing until they fade into the distant thumps of a person walking about on the second floor.

"So." Mac's earnest, serious voice interrupts Jack's upwards attention, and he looks over. The kid's taken a seat across from Curtis, Riley next to him on the low couch. "What can you tell us about the Northguard?"

Jack would very much like to hear this as well, and he moves to stand beside the couch they sit on, leaning his hip against the back.

"I can tell you straight off I was counting down the days until I could go home and never see any of those people again, that's for sure," Curtis says, snorting and shaking his head. "But then I guess providence intervened and I had an ice accident and well. Here we are."

Curtis goes on to talk about a group of cagey people as hostile and closed to outsiders as the landscape they've made their encampment in. It's a self-sustaining community of maybe twenty people with an additional ten rotating in and out depending on the week, shrouded in the woods outside Grand Marais, a town of less than fifteen hundred about an hour from the Canadian border. They run packages up through the national parks sitting on the border to a distributor in lower Ontario, who then passes the goods along to Canadian buyers looking to profit off of items perhaps more easily bought off Americans than sourced in their own country.

"Used to be drugs, at first," Curtis says. He's got his chin propped on a closed fist now, with his elbow braced on the arm of the chair. On his face is the look of a person in growing pain as medication for a major injury wears off, the clockwork dose beginning to taper away. It's a look Jack has seen on a lot of other faces, one he tries not to think about noticing on Mac's face more and more as time wore on.

Clearing his throat and adjusting his leg a little, Curtis goes on. "Back when they were just a baby fringe group of like-minded scary bastards looking for a way to finance their break from general society, it was drugs. But then they found out that hey, weapons can actually be a lot more lucrative going across that particular border, and also happen to be way less likely to get their own hooked on the product. Not good for business when your runners are sampling the goods, y'know? So they run a clean operation now, no drugs in sight."

Riley's actually got a little notebook out, jotting things down as Curtis talks, and Jack feels that by now familiar warmth of pride ignite in his chest like a hearth.

"We heard there was talk of something bigger coming through," Mac says, leaning forward, forearms folded over his knees. "Some kind of biologic?"

"My big break," Curtis sighs, then winces, a snort of laughter escaping him, "no pun intended, came right before my _actual_ big break when I fell. Heard we were getting something new in, and that's when I got this." His hand goes into his pocket and fishes out a piece of paper, which he passes over to Mac.

Walking around the back of the couch, Jack leans over Mac and Riley's shoulders to get a look at the item, at the words scrawled across it.

_boss is going too far. bioweapon. one month. stop him._

"It's short, to the point, and absolutely terrifying to find on your floor when you think you're being super convincing in your undercover assignment. Someone shoved it under the door of my unit," Curtis says while Mac turns the note over, examining the back side of it. There's no more too the message, just some smudges on the back where it had likely picked up dirt from the floor inside the door.

He goes on to explain that they're not entirely sure who had put the note there, but there's a strong suspicion. Two of them, in fact. The head of the Northguard, a violent man named Luke Holte with two prior convictions for assault and battery and reckless driving causing serious bodily injury, has four lieutenants who assist with the running of the organization. Two of them are his adult children, twins in their late twenties, a man and a woman. Curtis thinks, based on the form of address - "Most everyone just calls him Holte, it's just his kids I've heard call him 'boss' like that, it's a little weird." - that it's likely one of them, though he has no indication as to which one.

"So, let me just see if I'm on top of exactly what the situation is here," Jack says. His headache is getting worse by the minute. "We're walking into a remote camp full of hostile weirdo mountain people with guns and an axe to grind with the government and everybody else, and we have _one _potential ally whose identity is still unknown, and we've gotta find a biological weapon we don't know the location of, all in subzero weather while undercover as cult-y militia wannabes ourselves."

"That's about the long and short of it, there's just one more catch."

Sometimes, Jack loves his job. This, right here, this is absolutely not even close to one of those times.

"There's one more catch," he repeats, turning away and throwing his hands up to pace a circuit of the small living room. "Of course there's one more catch. Why wouldn't there be one more catch."

"Whatever it is, given what the note said about a month, and when I got it, they're moving it next week, so your timeline is tight. You've got about six days. Maybe eight if you're lucky." Curtis cringes. "And you're probably not going to be lucky."

"Awesome." The word Riley says is exactly the one Jack was thinking, in exactly the tone he'd been thinking it in. "That's just… awesome."

Before long, Evelyn comes back down the stairs with the news that they had a car for them, and her brother should be pulling up with it now, his roommate taking him back home after. Jack elects to go help her transfer whatever was needed to it, while Mac and Riley gathered what they were going to be taking from the collection of winter clothing set out for them on a table. He nabs a large, down-filled coat and zips it up, then heads straight for the door. Better to get this over with as soon as possible.

The cold is, somehow, worse than he'd remembered it. It's barely six in the evening but it's as frigid and hostile outside as if it were two or three in the morning. Evelyn isn't especially talkative as they approach the new car, and Jack appreciates it. It's too damn cold out to talk.

The truck is a dark, forest-green Ford F150, an older model that has clearly seen years on the road, worn but well cared-for. It does, to credit of Evelyn's resourcefulness, look like the kind of car one would imagine a man like Jack Nylander would drive, and certainly far less likely to raise eyebrows than the one they'd shown up driving.

"Got a false bed in the back," Evelyn tells him, breath fogging out in front of her as she speaks. "Pretty shallow, hard to notice unless you're looking specifically. He's a dentist but he fly-fishes, y'know, and he's paranoid about theft. Fly-fishers, they're maniacs about their gear. We had a signal booster in Curt's truck when he was up there so we could have better comms access on our frequencies, keep our surveillance equipment running. Signal's pretty garbage up there otherwise."

It's quick work to get the truck sorted. There's not much to load up, all three of them traveling rather light, which Jack is grateful for, given the weather. When he looks up, pausing for a second on the porch, the clouds up above look heavy and threatening. It's not snowing now but it will be soon, if the look of the sky is anything to go off of.

Inside the house, Mac is zipping up a dark blue outer coat, gloves tucked into the pocket, heavy waterproof boots laced up over the cuffs of his pants. He looks ready to go, but Riley is still wearing the Los Angeles-suited 'winter jacket' she'd arrived in, and Jack frowns.

"C'mon, Ri, we gotta get a move on before-"

"Actually, I'm not going." She's standing up now, shoulders back and jaw set, completely sure in what she's saying and Jack lets her continue without interrupting, because evidently some kind of conversation happened while he and Evelyn were getting the truck ready. "We were talking, and I'm gonna stay here with Evelyn and Curtis and keep an eye on things from here. They've got a really impressive tech set-up upstairs, satellite on the camp and radio chatter monitoring and stuff like that. I'm not well trained enough for this anyway and uh." Riley's face twists into something of a wry smile and she gestures down generally at herself. "I don't think I'm exactly going to fit in with a Northern Minnesotan separatist militia. C'mon."

Jack winces. "That's a good point, actually. A really good point."

"We'll keep Riley here, then," Evelyn agrees, nodding. "Monitor things on our end, stay in constant communication.

"And they won't be suspicious when she doesn't show up?" Much as Jack wants to agree, perfectly fine with keeping her out of danger when he's already got such a bad feeling about all of this to begin with. But he can't help but worry that, if they were already going to be suspicious of they showed up a day after the planned meeting, showing up one person short might be a colossal red flag.

"Trust me, they'd probably be more suspicious if she did," Curtis says. He's still in the exact same place he'd been in when Jack left the building, sitting in an awkward-looking slouch in that armchair. "We only seeded two aliases in with them to begin with, so they were always going to have way more questions about her than you. We didn't hear about her until uh… Last week, ish?"

"Alright," Jack says, relieved that there's justification to keep her out of this situation she's nowhere near ready for. "That settles it then, I suppose."

"And you'd better be going," Evelyn puts in. "I'd love to stand around and chat, you all seem like nice people, but they're expecting you tonight, so. Get a move on, right? And be careful. Don't turn your back on any of them for a moment."

"We won't," Jack agrees solemnly, meeting her eyes straight on.

They're near the door, Jack grabbing a last few items of winter clothing, a hat and some thick gloves, when he glances over his shoulder, notices that Mac isn't quite as well insulated as he could be. On an impulse, Jack snags another hat, a black knit beanie, and a grey scarf. He turns and, without thinking, pulls the hat down over Mac's blond hair, going to loop the scarf around his neck, saying, "Here, you're gonna freeze up there."

"I got it, thanks." The response is strange and strained, Mac snatching the scarf out of his hands before Jack can get it around him. Jack doesn't let it phase him, moving on outside with one last glance over at Riley, safe and warm inside the house with Evelyn and Curtis.

Jack can't ignore the odd tension in Mac as they climb into Evelyn Moua's brother's truck, the way he holds himself stiffly, turned away from Jack towards the window. The hat has stayed on his head, pulled down low over his ears, and with the scarf now wound around his neck and tucked into the front of his coat, there's not a lot of his face visible in the reflection of the window. He shakes his head and turns on the car, pulling away down the street towards the highway that will take them nearly the entire way to where they're headed. The turn off the road from Minnesota Highway 61 to the Northguard's camp isn't on any map, so they'd needed a specially programmed set of directions they'd got from Curtis.

As they drive along the harbor, Jack decides to try something.

"So what _did_ you do for your birthday?" he asks, and Mac lets out a sigh deep enough that it's audible.

"Just let it go, Jack."

"I'm askin' cause obviously we couldn't be there to celebrate it with you, the way friends are _supposed_ to do for a person, I hope Bozer at least knew about it. Birthdays are for people telling you they're glad you're here, y'know?"

"It doesn't matter, Jack," Mac says, a little louder. "I'm not upset you missed it. It's fine."

Jack shakes his head but doesn't push it at the moment. He focuses on the road, on guiding the car left, onto Minnesota 61 North. The road stretches dark and endless before them, the inside of the car shrouded in a thick, uncomfortable silence. Snow begins to fall just as the lights of the Duluth harbor disappear one by one in the rearview mirror, and the highway curves away into the vast stretches of sparsely populated land that lay between them and their destination. The forest opens up and soon engulfs them, and Jack feels, unease prickling at the base of his neck, as if they've been swallowed alive.

They talk, after a while. Mac has a folder open in his lap, given to him by Curtis while Jack had been outside with Evelyn. It contains information on every consistent member of the Northguard militia, though privately, Jack wonders what they're doing calling themselves a militia if there's only twenty of them. Every militia he's ever heard of before had much wider ranks - though, maybe that was just a Texas thing. Up here, he supposes, especially the further up you got, twenty people, thirty on a good day, is kind of a lot.

Mac reads information out of the folder, telling Jack about what's been collected on the people they're about to live amongst for however long it takes to sort this bioweapon thing out. The one that makes Jack instantly the most nervous is one of the lieutenants, William Anderson, who has charges in his rap sheet that make Luke Holte's look like petty messing around. Curtis left a post-it on his section of the dossier, too - one simply reading, in the agent's spiky handwriting, '_piece of work'_.

They're almost to their destination, a mere thirty minutes separating the truck from the camp, when Jack makes a mistake. Or, rather, makes the final piece of a mistake he's been making in steps since they'd hardly left Duluth, but doesn't realize until it's too late. They're pulling into the parking lot of one of Minnesota's bizarrely well-outfitted rest stops, a circular building with machines inside dispensing snacks and hot coffee, when Jack makes the comment, hardly thinking about it as it slips out of his mouth.

"Please tell me you didn't just sat around in Whittacker and Tam's lab or something, because if that's how you spent your birthday-"

"Jack, just _drop it!"_ Mac snaps, explosively loud, startling Jack into silence. His shoulders are heaving with heavy breaths, and he's looking away, out towards the rest stop's building. "Stop asking, just _stop asking_ about my birthday, it doesn't matter."

He leaves abruptly, snatching their empty coffee thermoses as he goes, elbowing the door shut behind him. Jack is left alone in the car, speechless and guilt-sick. He really had meant to stop after a point, when it didn't seem like the jokes were doing anything to lighten the mood or get Mac to open up about why he hadn't just told them it was his birthday. Jack had resolved to let it drop at that, but he hadn't been thinking, and it had slipped out like it had been for the past hour, as he guessed what it was Mac had done with the day he turned twenty-four. Mac had shown nothing but confusion and mild annoyance, right up until it cracked and became clear just how badly the whole line of discussion was bothering him.

When Mac gets back to the car, he rips the passenger's side door open with far more force than Jack had been expecting. He'd hoped the few minutes inside the rest stop would've given the kid space and time to settle down, but evidently, it didn't end up working out that way. Instead, Mac seems more upset than before, agitated and angry. A bag of trail mix lands in Jack's lap, his refilled thermos of coffee is shoved into his hand, and Mac sits down with a thump, dropping into his seat and slamming the door. Before Jack can remind him this isn't actually their car, and Evelyn's brother presumably wants it back without new damage, Mac is talking.

"On my tenth birthday," he spits out, loud and fast, staring straight ahead out of the windshield, "my dad left. He walked out the door before I could ask where he was going, and then he didn't come back. I stayed up until _three in the morning_ waiting for him, looking out my grandfather's window, hoping he'd pull into the driveway with some- with some _amazing_ gift and an apology. I didn't see him again for a year and a half."

Jack doesn't know what to say. He wants to tell Mac to stop, that this isn't information he should be giving up unless he chooses to, unless he's decided he wants Jack to know. More than anything he wants to go back in time and cut it out before he inadvertently rips stitches out of a wound that is obviously still causing Mac a great deal of pain. He'd thought he'd been doing so well with that so far, with treading carefully while also not treating his young partner with kid gloves, as he came to slowly realize just what a raw, pulverized mess Mac really is inside.

In all his thinking on what he wants to say and what he could've said and what he wishes he could un-say, Jack takes too long in doing or saying anything at all, because Mac launches straight back into it. He's still speaking in that too-fast, too-loud voice, and he won't look at Jack even as he splits the man's heart into pieces with what he says next.

"Eighteen months and I had no idea where he was. If he was ever coming back. Eighteen months I didn't hear a word, if he was alive or dead, and then one day he was just… in the living room when I got home from school. And every-" Mac's voice almost breaks on the word and he swallows visibly, voice compensatorily louder and stronger when he continues. "Every day since, I have been wondering if he regrets it. If he looks at me and asks himself 'what the hell did I come back for', so- So I can get behind celebrating achievements, and lives saved, and days when the world is a safer place because of what I've done but I can't just- My birthday has _never_ been about anyone being _glad I'm here,_ and it never will be."

Quiet, filled with heavy, ragged breathing, and the soundless breaking of Jack's heart. His mouth is dry and his throat hurts and he's so angry he could throttle James MacGyver if the man appeared in front of him now. But instead of saying anything of the sort, Jack clears his throat and says, "I'm sorry."

Mac doesn't respond.

They drive away in heavy, aching silence, and Jack can't tell who in this moment he's more angry with, James or himself.


	22. A Couple Dumb Mistakes

here we goooooo, on with the minnesota mission! as always, a big broken record thank you from my heart to yours.

* * *

They're approaching their turn quickly. Mac knows because the specifically programmed GPS route tells them so, and because he's been seeing more and more frequent signs for Grand Marais. The markings of civilization, of sustained human life, have dwindled the farther up they get, and the snow gets heavier still in turn. A few times there's a moment where the car skids slightly on packed snow and ice and hot flashes of adrenaline spark down his spine. He and Jack have exchanged hardly a word since the rest stop, since Jack made one too many comments about his birthday and Mac lost it on him.

Mac holds himself stiff and looks resolutely out the window, watching snow fall thicker and thicker over the lake. It's too dark to see too far out over it, and it gives the impression that Lake Superior stretches out forever into the pitch black of the night, a yawning chasm that could consume him whole and leave no trace behind if it so chose. Only the occasional halogen-lit billboard breaks through the dark.

Another one looms up through the haze of snow and night, wide and bright and alien amongst the thick walls of trees crowded in on either side of the road. It's almost on them by the time Mac makes out what it says. There's a high-res image of a young man blown far larger than life, wearing what Mac has in less than half a day come to recognize as the Minnesota hockey team's jersey. He wears a number eleven on his chest and an intensely serious look on his face, staring out over the forest and pointing a hockey stick under the words in massive, bold yellow typeface.

ALWAYS AIM TRUE NORTH

"True North," Jack reads off the sign as it passes and fades behind them. "As opposed to what other kinda North, I wonder?"

It's the most they've said, either of them, since the rest stop, and Mac hopes he's recognizing the olive branch for what it is. He clears his throat, which feels dry and constricted, and tries to sound normal when he talks.

(Normal like he hadn't actually spent his birthday quietly watching movies with Bozer alone in their house, like his roommate hadn't spent the night sleeping next to him, a hand on Mac's side because it's the one day a year he can't ever stand to wake up and be alone. Normal like he's not remembering the day so many years ago when he found out for sure just how much more chasing Jonah Walsh mattered to James MacGyver than his son. Normal like he hasn't maybe just ruined whatever good thing he and Jack were building together with this partnership. Normal like the idea of breaking that bond scares him so bad he wants to douse it in gasoline and light it up, if only so he doesn't have to live with the possibility of ruining it somehow hanging over him like an anvil suspended by hope and the good will of Jack Dalton alone.)

"The North on a compass isn't actually North," Mac says, eyes still trained completely out the window. His breath fogs the glass a little as he speaks. For a moment, then, Mac pauses, waiting to be told to shut up or stay focused or quit showing off. When nothing comes but silence, he tentatively pushes on. "That's magnetic North. Magnetic North shifts, because of the magnetic fields around the Earth, it moves around. Changes. It's not the same place it was last year or the year before that. It's somewhere over Canada now, I think, in the arctic. Actual North, like along the longitudinal lines, that'll take you all the way to the North Pole, that's steady. It never shifts or changes, you always know exactly where it is. That's true North."

There's a soft, interested sound from the other side of the truck's cab and Mac risks a glance over. Jack's eyes are fixed on the road straight ahead and he's nodding thoughtfully, brow furrowed in a pensive frown.

"That's really cool, actually," he muses. "I never knew that."

Mac shrugs one shoulder. "Well," he says, hating how the awkward stiffness in his voice comes out sounding cold, almost annoyed. "Now you do."

Jack gives no response. Well. Almost no response. A muscle in his jaw twitches just slightly, and Mac looks quickly away. He doesn't need to add anything more to the turmoil built up and boiling inside his chest. If only Jack hadn't kept pressing the issue of his birthday. If only he'd been like every partner Mac had never had before who either wasn't around long enough to reach his birthday or was nowhere near giving a damn when it was.

(Except for his first partner. His first partner had cared, right up until he-)

Mac shakes his head. He can't think about that right now because if he does, if he adds that on top of his birthday, eighteen months spent wondering if his dad was ever coming home, fourteen years spent wondering about what he'd done to make the man leave, and working frantically every second trying not to make that mistake again -

Sometimes wishing he would, and that James would leave, and those evaluating, judging, disappointed eyes would finally be off him and he'd be free.

Well. He can't afford to be thinking about _any_ of that at the moment. He's got to focus on the job at hand. Isn't that what James is always warning him about? His feelings are going to get someone killed someday.

Just before the turn to the remote road, barely ploughed and half drifted with sheets of snow, Jack opens the center console and fishes out the range-boosted phone Curtis sent them with. It sounds cartoonishly loud and echoing in the silent space between them in the truck, and Mac is half-sure someone is about to walk out of the woods and catch them making the call, know immediately that they're lying and their cover will be blown before they've even been able to introduce their aliases.

Riley answers the call. Mac gets the distinct impression she is both relieved and surprised to discover they haven't killed each other since leaving Duluth and making the call. Jack updates her on how they're doing - fine - and where they're at - the turnoff for the encampment. There's some noise in the background on her end and the call is abruptly switched to speaker, the voice of Curtis Hansen joining Riley's.

"It'll probably be Holte, Anderson, the twins, and maybe one or two others meeting you," he says, and Mac hopes the edge in his voice is just the connection. The perfect, crystal-clear connection, helped along by the specially rigged phone and the booster attuned to their equipment only, hidden beneath the shallow false bed of Evelyn Moua's brother's truck. "Even this time of night, they like to make a first impression. They'll probably be armed. Actually, y'know, you two got guns?"

"Yeah," Mac answers stiffly. As if he could ever forget that.

"Don't go anywhere without 'em. _Anywhere,_ you understand?"

"Loud and clear," Jack tells him, shooting a glance Mac can't decipher at him over the top of the phone. "Thanks, man. We'll check in again when we're settled."

"Be careful," bites in Riley's voice, rushed like she needed to make sure to get it out before it was too late and the tenuous link between them was severed once more.

Her urgency seeps into Mac too and he wants to pick up the phone and clutch it to his ear, keep talking to Riley, hold onto her voice and that billboard and the sign pointing towards Grand Marais, anything he can get to prove they aren't alone out here. That these woods won't engulf them and the lake won't snatch them from the shore and refuse to give them back.

"Promise," Jack says in his strongest, most reassuring voice, and then the connection is gone. The call is ended and they're plunged back into silence, roaring in Mac's ears like something threatening and alive.

The sound of the engine turning over, Jack starting the car back up, is at least something to stave off that horrible echoing quiet, and Mac tries his best to look like he isn't beyond unnerved, that he doesn't want to get out and as far away from Minnesota as he can get and never come back. Stay where there's sun and sea and people in every direction.

"You ready for this?" Jack asks, and Mac nods.

"Ready."

It's a good thing the truck has a robust set of snow-tires on it, because the trek down the narrow, tree-crowded, dubiously-termed 'road' is not an easy one. There's snow and ice beneath the snow and more snow beneath that, all over a path that was never paved to begin with. The sound the snow makes compacting beneath them sets Mac's teeth on edge and he can feel the ache that's been building between his shoulderblades and creeping up his spine this entire trip intensify. By the time they see the glow of life not their own begin to pinprick through the heavy, suffocating dark beyond their headlights, Mac feels about ready to crawl out of his skin.

When the trees finally break, Mac gets his first look at the Northguard's camp. It's a small organization of small buildings, centered around one larger building which has a more permanent look to it than the rest. Lights illuminate it from the inside, as well as a small handful of the other buildings, but most of the area is dark. Porch lights on some of the smaller structures - fairly quickly identifiable as the type of mobile homes common among oil field workers and remote-site construction operations - cast a sickly yellow pallor across the snow, throwing the entire area into ghoulish valleys of light and shadow. A small semi-circle of people stand waiting for them beside the larger, main building, all four of them turning when they hear the truck approach.

Even from this distance, Mac can immediately tell that all four of them are armed. Two have handguns strapped to hips or thighs, while the other two wear rifles slung over shoulders. Three men and a woman, Mac knows who they are immediately, could probably have guessed even if he hadn't just spent the better part of the drive staring at their pictures in the dossier. Luke Holte, his twin adult children, and the unhinged lieutenant Curtis had seemed scared of in his files, William Anderson. Jack pulls the truck to a stop and pauses for a moment before they get out. His eyes search Mac's face, and Mac can't figure out what it is he's looking for. He doesn't know if the man finds it, either, because by the time he gets his wits about him to ask, Jack is opening the door and stepping out into the frigid night.

Mac follows him quickly, trying not to let it show on his face how much the cold instantly sears his lungs, leaving him momentarily breathless and off-kilter as he follows Jack over to their welcoming committee.

"You must be Jack Nylander," the man with the rifle says, holding out one gloved hand towards Jack as they come within range. "Luke Holte."

"Pleasure, Mr. Holte," Jack says, voice and face neutral, shaking the offered hand. "This is my nephew, Mac." It's just as odd as he was expecting it to be, hearing the word out loud, the familial claim to him in Jack's voice. It sends an odd prickle down Mac's neck and he ignores it, focusing instead on the Northguard members in front of him.

Holte's gaze turns on Mac, who has to fight the instinct to shrink away, step behind Jack or just take off and get out of here immediately. Instead he puts a brave face on and keeps his chin up. The man doesn't offer him a handshake, and Mac is off-put by this, but glad. If he doesn't have to put his own hand out, nobody will be able to see that it's shaking. Not only does Holte not shake his hand, he doesn't speak to Mac at all, turning instead back to Jack.

"My boy, here, Owen, and my girl, Grace," Holte says, gesturing to the younger man with the handgun and the woman with the rifle. His kids look eerily like him, with the same sandy light brown hair peeking out from under thick hats, the same sharp angled faces and thin mouths. His hand moves to the side to indicate the last individual left without introduction, the older man with the handgun, who Mac recognizes immediately from his photograph. Somehow he looks even meaner in person, jaw square and strong, flat shark's eyes boring right into them. "And this is Will Anderson."

"Thought there was supposed to be one more of you," Anderson comments, one eyebrow raising up high on his forehead. Unlike the rest of everyone standing around under the glow of the window above them, he doesn't wear a hat, and snowflakes have frosted lightly in the strands of his nearly white-blond hair. For the life of him, Mac can't figure out why they're doing this outside.

"Young love," Jack says in an easy tone, with just the barest edge to it, the hint of an eyeroll. A man the age of Holte and Anderson, meeting them on common ground over the fickleness of young hearts. "Comes and goes just as fast."

Anderson lets out a sharp snort of derisive laughter, silenced by a quick look from Holte.

"Right," Holte drawls, moving straight on over the absence of Riley quicker than Mac would've hoped for. It would seem that Curtis had been right, and it was a very good thing indeed they hadn't brought her. "My _point_ is, you see these three? Out here you answer to me, or you answer to them, understand? You do as you're told and you don't argue. That's going to be rule number one, if you're going to last here at all."

Mac nods silently, and Jack says, "Understood."

"I'll save most of it for the morning, I'm sure you're tired from your drive up." Though the words were magnanimous, the tone was as icy as the air beginning to make Mac feel dizzy from the way the cold crackles in his lungs. "Just know, straight off, I don't care how well Curtis knows you, I don't know you at all. His word is good enough to get you in the door, but you earn your right to stay here. And you keep him," here he finally acknowledges again beyond that first look, pointing square at his chest, "in line. Your sister's boy or not, we don't tolerate lip out of kids here, and there'll be no attitude on my watch."

"Yes, sir," Jack agrees, nodding. Even as well as Mac knows him, as long as they've worked together now, he can't detect anything off in his voice, just a small twitch in that same muscle in his jaw, a flicker gone as quick as it happens.

"Anderson'll walk you to your place, then," Holte dismisses, waving his hand and beginning to walk away before he's hardly finished speaking.

The twins, Owen and Grace, follow shortly behind him, leaving Mac and Jack alone with Will Anderson, who starts promptly off in the other direction. They're quick to follow him, Mac nearly having to jog to keep up with the unexpectedly brisk pace. It's one of the mobile homes they're headed to, looking like the kind Mac has occasionally seen being driven down the highway, one of the more bizarre sights along American interstates. An entire tiny house, loaded on the back of a truck, barely larger than a camper van, driving down the road.

"Curtis's old place," Anderson announces, slapping a palm on the outside, snowflakes shaking loose and fluttering to the ground. He looks back and grins, wolfish. "See you in the morning, boys."

He disappears back towards the other mobile homes, the wind whistling through the trees and sending loose sheafs of snow skittering across the crust formed over the last fall of it drowning out his footsteps before he's gotten a hundred feet. Mac's so cold at this point it's like he can feel the shivering inside his bones, and it takes several moments longer than it should have to coordinate his feet into carrying him up the steps into the living quarters, following Jack.

It's not much warmer inside, but the walls shutting out the wind do a lot to improve the situation. Mac stands by the closed door, shivering hard and trying to regain feelings in his hands, while Jack walks over to the heater and switches it on. The thing makes an alarming rattling noise as it comes to life, then settles. It's clearly a space meant to be occupied by one person that has been adjusted to accommodate two, cramped and a little claustrophobic. A second bed has been placed where previously there may have been a dresser or a desk, barely twenty feet separating them, with a sink and a small countertop at the far end, next to a door to the attached bathroom. A microwave sits on the counter, along with a coffee pot, but not much else. Clearly, most of the living at this place was done outside of the small houses.

By the time he's done taking stock of what's present in the single, long room, Mac has regained enough feeling to move around, and the quickly acting heater has warmed the air enough to allow him to take his outer jacket off without feeling like he's about to freeze to death. A quick glance at his phone shows the temperature outside to be ten below zero, making this one of the coldest places he's ever been.

At the bed closest to the door of the mobile home, Jack is pulling out the phone he'd stashed in the inside pocket of his jacket, dialing their base in Duluth. Mac listens to the ring and tries to both warm up and calm down, to shake the dead look in Anderson's eyes and the way Holte wouldn't hardly look at him, never mind speak to him once.

When this is relayed to him, Curtis doesn't sound surprised.

"Yeah, he's always had this weird thing about kids, which to him is anybody younger than his, basically. Thinks people need to earn the right to sit at the grownups table. There was this woman and her son who used to swing by for a while before they moved East, Wisconsin I think, he wouldn't really talk to the son at all, I think it's part of why they left."

"Might play to our advantage," Mac says, trying to avoid the way that makes him feel, a sinking stone of apprehensive nerves in his gut. "If he doesn't take me seriously, I might be able to sneak around without being noticed, poke into things. Could be a good thing he won't really pay attention to me."

"Could very well be," Curtis agrees, though he sounds reluctant. "Watch it, though. Don't let him think you're trying to shirk duties or ignore orders. He's got a respect thing, too, and the younger you are the worse it is. We made my cover a solid six years older than me and told everyone I just had a baby face to get around it. Just be careful, alright?"

"We'll be fine," Mac reassures, trying not to sound as uncomfortable as he is about the big deal being made of his age, especially this close after he'd blown up at Jack about his birthday. Not to mention how he feels about another overbearing patriarchal ruling force with a very specific thing about respect having too much control over his life, though any similarity between Luke Holte and James MacGyver is not one he wants to draw at the moment.

It must work, at least enough that, shortly, Curtis gets off the phone, letting Riley back on to reassert that she has them on satellite GPS and will call if anything looks out of the ordinary, anything at all. Mac can tell she's anxious about being back in Duluth while they're up here in the middle of nowhere, and he can't blame her. If it was her up here (if it was Jack up here alone) he would be out of his mind about it by now. So he talks to her for a moment, asking if the weather down there is as bad as it is up here, if they can go back to California yet, letting them both laugh before it really is time to hang up and try and get some sleep in preparation for the day to come.

He and Jack ready themselves for bed in a silence less uncomfortable than the one in the car, but not by a large margin. There were thermal sleeping clothes packed in with the winter gear Curtis and Evelyn arranged for them, thankfully. They must have once belonged to Curtis himself, a man around their height but built more like Jack than Mac, leaving them to hang on him loosely, like he's playing dress up in an older brother's clothes. With the last of his coats left hanging on a rack by the door, Mac feels cold beyond belief, despite the heater, and huddles down under the thick bedding on the bed farther from the door, trying to close his eyes and find some measure of peace.

Before he can drift off, or at least reach some state of meditative calm, Jack's voice cuts through the dark.

"I'm sorry," he says, quiet but clearly audible in the small space with only the click and tick of the heater to interfere. "About your birthday."

Mac's chest seizes up and feels impossibly tight, like he'd have to cough or clear his throat to get any words out. He doesn't, afraid of making such a gunshot loud sound in the midst of so much silence, of this fragile moment. Jack gives it a long moment before he goes on, long enough that Mac's lungs begin to relax their constriction, and the tone of his voice makes it clear how much painful sincerity exists in what he's saying.

"I'm sorry he did that to you," Jack continues, and the tightness is back, Mac's eyes burning though it's far too warm to blame it on the temperature. "And I'm sorry I wouldn't stop pushing when I should have. We don't gotta talk about it any more than that, but I needed you to know that I'm sorry. For all of it."

"It's fine." Mac's voice rasps out in a whisper, and he hates the way it sounds, small and unsteady. He regrets snapping at Jack in the car so intensely the guilt burns, almost as much as he regrets that the topic ever came up at all. "It's no big deal, Jack, it's fine."

"It is a big deal, and it's not fine." Jack's own voice doesn't raise any higher, doesn't snap or push. The contradiction is firm but kind, and Mac hates the way that sounds too, without being able to explain why. "None of it is fine. You deserve better than that."

Instead of answering, Mac turns his face fully into the pillow and tries to hope that Jack will believe he's fallen asleep mid-conversation, instead of fallen silent because he won't, can't think of anything to say. Jack doesn't say anything more either, and the room is quiet clear through until dawn.


	23. You Sure Are In Your Own Way

and once again this mission ended up longer than i thought it was, so the resolution to it shall have to wait another chapter.

now, onward! thanks so much as always, y'all are the best and i hope this chapter delivers. it's a favorite.

also as a note - i crosspost on ao3, and i've kind of lost the thread on what the etiquette of responding to reviews on here is, and i'm not sure how. but please know that each and every one is a joy and a delight to me and i appreciate them all.

(this chapter title is from mother mother's song 'get up')

* * *

It's really pretty easy to learn the ropes in the Northguard camp. Mac and Jack emerge from Curtis's mobile home the next morning, emerging into daylight that brings no warmth to the Earth it shines down on. The snow stopped falling at some point in the night, leaving maybe two or three inches of fresh fall on their parked truck, and indistinguishably added to that already on the ground. Jack catches him before they step through the door, apparently dissatisfied with the level of bundling Mac had taken it upon himself to do, once again pulling that hat from Curtis and Evelyn down over Mac's blond hair. The action has Mac standing, frozen and confused, taking a moment to lurch into motion and take the scarf Jack hands him next.

He doesn't try and put the scarf on this time, merely holding it out and waiting for Mac to take it. Mac accepts the fabric, tossing it around himself and tucking it into his jacket, cringing at the memory of what he'd done the day before, when they'd been standing in almost this same spot. It had been odd enough when Jack had just tugged the hat over his head, short-circuiting Mac's ability to respond to expected outcomes. Historically, people reaching abruptly for him has not ended well at all, and he was perfectly capable of putting his hat on himself. That Jack would do that, such a pointless and inexplicable action, hands brushing over Mac's head, had struck him dumb.

And then Jack had gone to loop the scarf around his neck, and Mac had snatched it out of his hands before he could, already thrown off by the strange, alien kind of affection involved in putting a hat on for someone. As he was already off-balanced, the sudden sight in his peripheral vision of someone reaching for him, straight towards the ugly scarring hidden by his jacket, had been too much to control his reflexes. Mac puts a hand up, pressing down over the fabric currently hiding the old injury, rolling his shoulder a little as he walks down the steps, following Jack out into the new light of the day. The scar has been aching since he set foot in this unbearable climate, settling into a persistent pain reminding him of just how tenuous and fragile his grip on life - and even more so on trust - is.

Breakfast is laid out in the main building, the one the others are all centered around. It's a former park ranger's outpost that was decommissioned a while back, then taken over by the Northguard when Holte moved his operation out of Grand Marais proper. It now houses the showers, laundry facilities, and a large industrial kitchen, all utilized by the residents of the encampment. A rotating schedule of militia footsoldiers put together a daily breakfast, while grocery runs happened every couple of days, leaving individuals on their own to either make their own lunches and dinners or plan them as a group.

It sounds almost like a nice, communal way to live, if it weren't for all the guns and the hostile looks and the weapons shipments laying in a shipping container somewhere in the woods and general one-charismatic-leader-away-from-a-cult vibe the whole place has.

Breakfast is doled out and eaten quickly, Mac losing track of what it had been before he's hardly left the building. Holte's daughter, Grace, is leading their tour of the Northguard's camp, showing them around everything of note that they hadn't been able to get to the previous night. She's walking briskly through the snow, boots crunching rapidly and head held high like she hardly notices the cold. Mac supposes that if you spent your whole life out here, you might get used to it. He tries to look unaffected as well, telling himself that Mac Nylander grew up here, is as used to this as Grace Holte is.

It doesn't really work, and Mac hopes he can pass his frown off as the sullen attitude his cover identity came with, unhappy to be dragged up here on his 'uncle's crusade to turn him into a productive member of society. There isn't much to see on their tour, and they make it quickly, doing a circuit of the mobile homes and the pathway to the shipping container where the weapons are stored prior to being sent upstate to the border. Mac can only imagine how they'd got the container out here to begin with.

It's set up on cinderblocks to avoid getting buried too deep in the snow to be accessed, and a rather complex looking electronic lock holds the door shut. For all their rustic image, it would seem the Northguard isn't above taking advantage of technology when it benefits them.

For the most part, it would seem that the daily operations of the camp were centered around the manifest and quality verification of the shipments of weapons, as well as the maintenance of the perimeter. Every item to be sent to their distributor at the border is to be carefully gone over, taken apart, and checked for flaws. An aspect of Holte's paranoia seems to have manifested itself as an obsessive need to verify the quality and operability of every weapon that passed through the Northguard up into Canada. This took a lot of time, given the sheer number of shipments now changing hands at this point in the operation. As for the perimeter, patrols are conducted in pairs or sometimes threes, making sure there's no indication of law enforcement or curious townspeople disturbing their remote hideout.

None of it sounds hard, in fact it all sounds boring as dirt to Mac, while Jack is doing a decent job at least pretending that this is exactly the kind of thing he'd sign up for in his daily life. The hard part is going to be sneaking around behind their backs in the few minutes here and there he won't have someone's eyes on him to track down the biologic before it managed to change hands. The next shipment is set, just like Curtis had predicted, for a week from the day they'd arrived, leaving six days from today in which to find the bioweapon and get it out of there.

Just six days. Six days to move amongst the Northguard and pretend he's one of them. Six days to be Mac Nylander, directionless drifter of a young man dragged by his uncle into the woods to learn direction. He can do this. Mac can do six days.

Days one and two pass without incident. Mac finds he doesn't exactly… dislike it, living with Jack, coming 'home' at the end of the day to that cramped, cold mobile home. He misses Bozer fiercely, there's no question, and he talks to Riley on the phone about something not at all related to their job at least once a day, chatter that lets him pretend he's somewhere other than this terrible, frozen place. Every so often, Mac finds himself with a handful of spare, unsupervised minutes, and he's able to slip away, poking around in the main building or near the shipping container, but all he's able to verify is where the biologic _isn't._

He also gets to overhear a number of truly delightful conversations in the main building during mealtimes, conversations that remind him this is a seperatist militia. Conversations about some kind of violent insurrection in the same kind of dreamy, distant tone with which a person discusses retiring to the beach in Hawai'i, about an 'us' and a 'them' and what 'us' should do about, to 'them'. It makes Mac's skin crawl just to hear it. Luckily, he and Jack are still regarded too much as outsiders to be pulled into the conversations themselves.

The third night they spend in the Northern Minnesotan woods, Mac wakes in the middle of the night, the wind howling outside, screeching past the walls of the mobile home like there's a spirit outside wailing out its pain. He fumbles a hand out from under the cocoon of blankets around him and squints at the bright light of his phone, lancing through the darkness. The weather app shows the temperature, windchill factored in, to be twenty-six degrees below zero outside. With a low groan in the back of his throat, hopefully mostly drowned out by the wind, Mac puts the phone back face-down on the floor beside his bed, and tries to get a few more hours' sleep.

One thing that does not change over the first few days that Luke Holte and Will Anderson do not, in any way, take Mac seriously. The two men in charge of the camp, it becoming quickly obvious that Anderson is not just Holte's lieutenant but his right hand, even before the twins, hardly speak to him. When they address him at all, it's mainly through Jack, offhandedly snapping that Jack should 'tell your boy' this or 'make sure your nephew' that. It has a strangely dehumanizing effect, this bizarre hierarchy of age, with specific deference given to the fact that Jack's cover is his cover's uncle, an older family member and therefore, by Northguard views, completely in charge of him.

This attitude, and exactly how serious the Northguard are when it comes to a deferential attitude from their younger members, comes to a head one night as Mac and Jack are working alone with Anderson in the shipping container. The pieces of several semi-automatic weapons are laid out on a table, being cleaned before being re-assembled and packed back away in their boxes. Jack is going over them, ensuring everything looks as it should, while Mac is relegated to repacking, monotonously putting pieces away in boxes exactly as they'd come.

Anderson is sitting at the table with a map spread open in front of him, walking Jack through the route they'll take with the upcoming shipment. He's mostly been ignoring Mac, speaking directly to Jack and pointing at the map that Mac has only gotten periodic glances at. Mac is sitting there, having trouble maneuvering a piece back into its place due to the tight way they were packed together, when Jack glances over like he's been doing periodically all evening, in a lull in Anderson's monologue.

"If you twist it to the side, it'll-"

"I _know,_ Jack, I wasn't born yesterday." The moment he says it, Mac regrets the way it came out, sullen and snappish like he actually is someone's combative, bratty nephew. He's ashamed of having given in to the impulse. The claustrophobia of this snow-locked countryside and how pretending at a familial relationship with Jack is making him feel has left him on edge and about to lash out, and it isn't Jack's fault he's having such inexplicable trouble with this mission.

Before he has the opportunity to apologize for it, though, before he can so much as make eye contact with Jack, there's a sudden burst of pain in Mac's skull. He blinks the surprised stars from his eyes and tries to get his bearings, figure out what's happened. Anderson is standing over him, having just shot out a hand and cuffed him over the back of the head, knocking his beanie off onto the floor and leaving his hair disheveled and falling into his face. It was a hard, shocking slap, and Mac is speechless, breath hitching and heart galloping in his chest.

Luckily, someone else saves him the need to speak at all. Another hand comes out of nowhere, seizing Anderson by the wrist and yanking him back before he can make another move towards Mac.

"HEY." The word is a half-shout, rocketed into the air of the storage unit and shattering it. "You do not lay a _finger_ on him, _Will,_ you understand me?" Jack's voice is furious and Mac can see him out of the corner of his eye, having stepped between the two of them, physically blocking the large, imposing man's line of sight, never mind his reach. He doesn't think he's ever seen Jack this angry, the entire time they've known each other.

"Keep your boy in line and I won't have to, _Jack,_ that's not how we talk to those older than us around here," the militia lieutenant snaps back, jerking his arm out of Jack's grip and glaring first at him, then back at Mac. The pain's already faded, but the jar to the system hasn't, and Mac feels like he's been knocked off-balance. His skin itches and he wants to run. "Your nephew wants to stay here with us, he's gonna have to get used to that. Now you, Nylander, you'd better keep a harder grip on him, cause he mouths off like that to you, pretty soon he'll start with us. Discipline begins in the home, see to it he understands that."

He steps back, sneer carved so deep into his face it's like he's been sculpted from stone. Anderson's eyes flick from Jack to Mac and back again, and Mac feels like he's about to have a panic attack at any moment.

The door closes softly behind Anderson, disappearing out into the snow, and the room sits in stiff, uncomfortable quiet. Jack leans down and fishes the knitted black hat off the floor. He doesn't make a move to put it on Mac himself this time, handing it to Mac from a distance. If Mac hadn't reached out to take the hat from him, there was no way their hands could have even met. He does reach out and take it, though, and neither of them acknowledge the way his fingers shake, grasping the material.

For a moment, it looks like Jack might be about to walk closer to him, might be about to reach out to him, touch him. For a moment, Mac thinks he might want him to, might wish more than anything that Jack would give him something steady to hold onto. At the last moment, though, just when it seems like Jack is taking a step forward, Mac abruptly stands, yanking the hat back onto his head, a dull pulse echoing from the back of his head where Anderson's palm had whacked against his skull.

They make short work of the rest of the case of guns, and Mac is glad that Jack doesn't try to make him talk about what just happened. Every so often he'll glance up and find Jack looking at him, watching him with an odd, unsettled look on his face, the anger still clinging around the edges. Mac looks quickly away when this happens, trying furiously not to let his hands keep shaking as he slots pieces of metal back together.

"If he ever tries to lay a hand on you again," Jack says suddenly, as they're on their way back to their temporary lodgings, "you tell me right away." His breath fogs out in front of him and his cheeks are red with cold, though Mac suspects something else may also be contributing to the color. He seems upset, and something about it prickles in Mac's chest, settles nausea into his gut. "If he so much as looks at you funny, I swear to god, Mac…"

If it's the cold, plummeting with the sun as it dips down below the horizon, or the words in that hard, worked up voice, Mac doesn't know, but something makes his breath stop in his chest. His throat hurts and he swallows hard. He tries to find something to say, some way to respond to that, the protective oath Jack has just made to Mac and the cold air and the dusk sky. They're walking back up the narrow steps and into the mobile home, and Jack still isn't done, apparently, because as they get inside, he turns to face Mac, starting again.

"No. Actually. I just… I don't want you to ever be alone with Anderson, okay? He's not gonna get the opportunity to pull anything like that again."

"Jack!" Mac snaps at the same time that his patience does.

His chest feels odd, breath catching and coming out ragged, and he doesn't know what's happening. For some reason, what Jack said, the image of him putting himself immediately between Mac and the man who'd hit him, it has him torn between running as far as he can get and breaking down sobbing and begging Jack to keep him, to _stay,_ to please _just stay._ One of those options is infinitely safer than the other, and Mac, in his second moment of childish pique of the evening, lets anger win.

"It was a slap! It's not like the guy _shot me_ or anything, it is _not_ that big of a deal. And what does it matter to you, anyway? You keep- I'm not your nephew! I'm not really your nephew, you're not really my uncle, and you're _definitely_ not my-"

The words choke dead in Mac's throat and he feels awful. Despite not having finished the sentence, both of them know what he'd been about to say next. The unspoken word hangs in the air between them and Mac feels his eyes stinging, his throat aching and tight. Whatever Jack is going to do, however this ends, Mac is going to deserve it. He's finally pushed too hard too many times, and if Jack is going to walk away, Mac is going to deserve it. If Jack takes a leaf out of Anderson's book and decides to slap him over the head or across the face, Mac is going to deserve it. So he sits down on his bed, refusing to allow himself to look away, and waits.

"You're my responsibility," Jack says.

There's no shouting. No slap. Jack's voice has gone quiet and oddly subdued, and Mac feels a hard spike of guilt lance through him. He wants to say something, to walk it back into the way it was meant, that Jack had no reason taking on more obligation than he needed to, that Jack wasn't beholden to him the way a father was to a son. That the more he acted like he was, the more Mac got used to it, and the more terrified that made him.

"I'm not going to stand there while some blowhard slaps you around. It's not going to happen. I don't care what I'm not," though Jack's face leads one to believe otherwise, "what I _am_ is the person here to keep you safe, and I'm gonna do that. Regardless of how objectively serious it is, whether there's any kind of physical damage done, the bottom line is that people do not get to hurt you, and especially not in front of me. It's unacceptable and I won't allow it."

Jack gives it a few moments, where Mac thinks he might be waiting for a response, even some kind of acknowledgement, and then turns to go. He has perimeter sweep that night with one of the other grunts with the militia, and the door closes with a light click behind him as he steps out into the freezing night. Mac is left alone in their temporary home, knowing full well he's messed up and having no idea how to fix it. Just as he's about to turn around and walk to his bed, for lack of any other recourse, a sound outside stops him.

The walls of the mobile home are thin and not especially well sound-guarded, and he can hear a voice, just beyond the door. Jack's patrol partner, one of the few women in the camp, he thinks it's the one with the bright red hair and the glasses. Mary-something maybe. The voices start close and peter off with distance, indicating she and Jack are walking away, leaving Mac only able to catch the first few sentences.

"Heard about what happened with Anderson," Mary-something says. Mac's entire body is dead-still, frozen inside with his hat and scarf still on, listening as hard as he can. "And look, Nylander, if you love your nephew at all-"

"I do."

"Well, okay, then you need to keep him in line around Anderson. You don't know what could happen if the kid pisses him off too bad."

The conversation fades too far away to hear any more than that, and Mac's knees almost go out. Numb, he stumbles over to his bed, dropping heavily onto the mediocre mattress. He feels like he's been gutted, like something heavy and freezing cold has slammed into his chest and knocked all of the breath out of him. Because Jack hadn't hesitated, hadn't even waited for Mary-something to fully finish her question before asserting his answer, strong and without a moment's pause.

_If you love him at all- I do._

Mac feels the words more strongly than he'd felt Anderson's hand cuffing the hat off his head, more deeply than the cold that's not left him for a moment since the plane touched down in Duluth. It hurts to hear, because it makes him wonder who had said it. Jack Dalton or Jack Nylander? And who had he been talking about - Dalton's partner or Nylander's nephew?

Jack might like him, Mac can understand that. Jack might even care about him more than he was supposed to by the nature of the job. But love is something different. Love is something more frightening and dangerous than anything they've faced in their almost year working together, if only because, in this moment alone in this mobile home in the middle of nowhere Northern Minnesota woods, Mac can admit, just to himself, that he wants it. The idea that Jack might actually love him, might look at the arrogant, distant, combative kid he'd been assigned to when Matty brought him on and see something worth staying for… All of it scares Mac to death with how much he wants it to be true. How much it _can't_ be true.

Eventually, Mac gets himself under control, pressing his hands hard over his face to scrub away the remnants of the ragged way this day has worn him down. All he wants is to find this bioweapon, get ahold of it, and get the _hell_ out of Minnesota. Maybe once this mission is over and they're home, far away from the snow and the cold and the Northguard, away from the Holtes and from Will Anderson, things will go back to normal.

He lays down, yanks the covers over himself, and sleep does not come.

The floor of the mobile home creaks under the footsteps Mac has come to recognize in pattern as Jack's, walking from the door not to his own bed, but instead toward Mac's. It takes every ounce of self control Mac has to maintain the illusion that he's sound asleep, keeping still as the footsteps slow and stop beside his bed. There's the soft rustle of fabric as Jack bends down, and the blankets are pulled up higher, until Mac's chest and shoulder are completely covered, fabric just brushing his chin. A tender, feather-light brush of fingers over the back of his head follows, ghosting over where Anderson had hit him.

Mac manages, somehow, to stay still, to prevent the catch in his breath from appearing to be anything other than that, a slight hitch of a sleeping chest. He expects that to be the end of it, but somehow it isn't, and the touch remains, making him feel as small as Holte and Anderson ignoring and talking over him had, but in a way that makes him feel safe rather than scared.

The hand on his head moves whisper-gently, smoothing over his hair again and again, and it seems almost like Jack is trying to erase the memory of Anderson hitting him. It's almost working, too, the small flashes of the brief moment of violence quelled in the face of the constant, gentle pressure on his head now, the slight dip of Mac's mattress where Jack is now perched at the edge of it. It reminds him, oddly and out of nowhere, of when he'd been shot in Stockholm, waking up in a Swedish hospital with James standing beside his bed.

He'd been shot in the neck and nearly died, and when he'd woken up, his father had looked at him, long and silent, until the pain meds took him back under again. The next time he woke, James had launched into a lecture about carelessness and keeping your guard up, about watching his own back because he's never going to be a great agent if he doesn't live long enough to learn to be one. James had gone on that disappointed, angry, maybe-worried rant, and then he'd left, eyes snapping abruptly off Mac as he'd walked out of the room, leaving Mac alone with his thoughts and thirty stitches he was too scared of ripping to so much as move his head to watch his father leave.

For several long, wordless minutes, Jack sits on the edge of his mattress, hand brushing over the back of Mac's head, strands of hair catching around his calloused fingers. It's impossible to understand, the way everything he'd ever wanted and never gotten from James seemed so _easy_ for Jack, and maybe that's why he does it. Maybe that's why, after all the lights have been extinguished and Jack has left, gone back to his own bed and laid down, he starts talking.

"I'm sorry." Mac's not sure where he finds the guts to say it, knowing that the moment he opens his mouth, Jack will know he's been awake the whole time, but he does. Somehow, he does, and the words float out into the room like they had their first night there, but in the other direction. "I didn't mean-" His mouth is dry and his face feels hot despite the cold, and Mac can't get the rest of the sentence out. "I'm sorry."

For a long moment, he wonders if Jack might have fallen asleep, or simply not known what to say in response. Then, just as Mac is about to roll over and hope to find some sleep himself, comes the voice, quiet but clearly audible in the small space.

"It's okay. I know you didn't." A pause, easy and non-threatening. "I promise. It's okay."

Mac closes his eyes tight shut and decides to try, at least try, to believe it.


	24. Stand Down Or Show Down

longer than i planned, both in writing it and in its actual wordcount length... but here it is! i could not let this monster of a mission drag out one more chapter so here we go. hope you enjoy reading it as much as i did writing it, cheers.

chapter title from 'pistols at dawn' by seinabo sey

chapter warnings: gun violence, minor bad-guy character death, blood and injury

* * *

It's a testament to exactly how deeply the cabin fever has set in that, when Evelyn Moua asks Riley if she'd like to come with her on a walk down by the lake, outside, in Minnesota in January, Riley accepts without hesitation. She zips up the warmest coat she can dig out of the safehouse's front closet and pulls a hat low over her face, following Evelyn out into the freezing air. It's fascinating to watch, for someone who's always lived in warm places, how her breath fogs out in front of her even through the scarf covering the lower half of her face.

They drive in Evelyn's car down to the lakefront and embark on a quiet, lonely walk over well-ploughed and salted slats of wood forming a walkway on the very edge of Lake Superior. It's hovering somewhere around three or four degrees out, and as Evelyn explained in the car, it's deep into the off-season for tourism, so it's just the two of them on the walk that day. There's an odd sound in the air, echoing and seeming to move around them, and Evelyn explains what it is when Riley asks, finally so unnerved that she has to know before her mind goes completely off the rails and starts inventing some kind of monster.

"It's the ice," Evelyn tells her, looking out over the grey-blue surface of the lake. "When it freezes like this, but not all the way through to the center, the motion of the water shoves the ice against the shore and cracks it. Because the waves are so strong in Superior, it eventually pushes the ice so far it starts overlapping onto itself. It's like… Like what happens with the Earth's plates, when there's an earthquake."

Riley nods, not wasting energy by responding out loud. Coming from California, earthquakes are something she definitely understands.

It's with the sound of the ice cracking and shifting in the background that she eventually broaches the subject and says, "I'm worried about them."

"Mac and Jack," Evelyn says, and Riley nods.

Mac had told her, reluctantly and after she'd needled him a bit about why he sounded off, that Will Anderson had hit him. He'd waited until Jack was called on a perimeter patrol and then explained in a distant, dismissive voice that Anderson had slapped him, but then hurried to qualify that it had been only once, not very hard, and was, as he'd put it, 'not even a big deal'. Personally, Riley would like to strongly disagree.

Not just because any time anyone hits Mac it is a 'big deal' - whether he thinks so or not - but also because, as she explains to Evelyn now, violence escalates. If Anderson will, for a minor infraction, hit him once, he'll do it again, and Evelyn agrees, nodding before she's even finished the sentence. Riley only grows more worried, the inside of her chest feeling as cold as the skin of her cheeks when she hears it, as Evelyn explains that they've seen this kind of behavior from Anderson before.

They'd warned Mac and Jack about it, the time Curtis had witnessed where Anderson had split Owen Holte's lip with the butt of his rifle, clocking the young man across the face with it in response to some comment he'd found somehow particularly out of line. Luke Holte himself had been standing not twenty feet away, according to Curtis, and had watched passively as his lieutenant struck his son, saying not a word about it. It's this anecdote that alarmed Riley even more than the mass amounts of weaponry present at the Northguard camp. Because if the leader of the militia was willing to watch Anderson hit one of his adult children across the face with a rifle, there's really no telling what he'd let his loose canon of a second in command to do to someone else.

"We've got a date, and they've got a location," Evenlyn says after a minute's silent walk, now heading back towards the car. The ice-crusted snow crunches under Riley's boots and she has to squint in the bright, watery sunlight cascading down over the snowed out landscape and making her understand why Evelyn had worn sunglasses on the drive over. "They're going to be done soon one way or another."

It's true, but the unease lingers in Riley's stomach as she climbs back into the car. They pull away from the deserted path by the lake and she watches pensively out the window, eyes roaming over the brightly lit piles of cracked and pushed up ice at the shore. Something about the lake itself puts her on edge as well, the vast power of it making her feel small and powerless. Evelyn cranks the heat and Riley looks away, trying to focus on what she'd said. They'd be done soon, and then they could all go home.

When they return to the safehouse, Curtis is in the kitchen. He's perched on the edge of a chair, casted leg awkwardly stretched out beside him, bent over a massive dinner table covered in maps. They're laid out one next to the other, topographical, navigational, general reference, and what looks like one he'd drawn himself, crudely sketched out and added to in at least four different colors of marker. It looks to Riley like Curtis is probably more stir crazy than she is, and she figures he's got the right to be. He's stuck inside completely, unable to risk leaving the house in the ice with his broken femur, while the mission he's devoted months of his life to culminates miles and miles North of him.

Judging by the way he's marking up the laminated maps, the small Post-It flags stuck here and there, he appears to be laying out the likely routes the Northguard will be taking on what they don't yet know will be their final attempt to cross the Canadian border. Riley walks over until she's standing at his right shoulder, looking over him down at the maps. They don't look like any maps she's ever seen before - though granted the most exposure Riley usually has to maps is of the Google variety, when trying to figure out how to get to a building in Los Angeles she's never been to.

"So there's just…" Riley trails off, her eyes raking over the collection of maps Curtis has laid out, all taking a different approach to the same stretch of land. "There's really nothing out there, huh? It's just trees and lakes. I'm not seeing any cities on here."

"Yeah, well. Welcome to Northern Minnesota. It's Duluth and then it's a handful of itty bitty places, and then Grand Marais, and after that it's just the Boundary Waters." One of Curtis's hands sweeps out over the top of the maps. "That's what it's called, the big old wilderness preserve up here. Got sections you're not even allowed to take motorized vehicles into, it's just canoeing and portage. When I first heard somebody was actually using that area for smuggling my first thought was that they must be completely insane to try something like that."

A shiver runs through Riley's shoulders and up her neck and she suddenly wants to duck back into the living room and grab a hat, turn the thermostat up in the house. Anything to stave off even the _thought_ of what it must feel like up there.

"Near as I can tell," Curtis continues, seemingly oblivious to the odd horror Riley is being struck by, looking at and thinking about that place, that domineering chasm of trees and water that could take you away and never let you be found in a heartbeat, "they're probably headed up through Gunflint." One finger taps a lake smack on the US Canadian border, one slightly larger than most around it. "Maybe between there and North Lake, to avoid the lodge on the West of Gunflint. That's about the closest to civilization you're gonna get up there, and they won't want to trip anyone's alarm bells."

"Will our guys be able to bring their gear with them up there?"

"They're going to be able to take the range-boosted phone, stick it in an inside jacket pocket or something, but that's about it." Curtis thinks about it for a moment, then shrugs one shoulder. "I mean. They're gonna have their guns obviously, but, y'know, so will every Northguard wacko who's on the roster for this run, so that's not gonna be a massive help. They won't even be able to take the truck - once they reach the real dense part of the forest they're gonna be on offroading vehicles."

"So a couple outnumbered weapons and a ranged phone. And that's it," Riley repeats, just to be sure she's got things right. She knows she does, but a part of her can't help but hope she's somehow misunderstood, that things aren't that bad. No such luck.

"That's what it's all gonna come down to," Evelyn says, nodding solemnly, her eyes fixed on the innocuous topography map that represents mile after mile of remote, unforgiving forest, the path traced through Gunflint Lake, "unless Mac can find the biologic in time."

Mac does not find the biologic in time.

The day of the planned transport arrives, and Mac wakes up that morning with his heart in his throat. He and Jack have been conscripted to attend this trip up to Canada, at least for the American side of the run. They've been charged, under the supervision and direction of the entire Holte family and Will Anderson, along with three other Northguard footsoldiers, with transporting the weapons to a cabin an approximate thirty miles as the crow flies from their current location.

From that cabin, hidden deep in the trees on the Eastern side of Gunflint Lake, other Northguard will take it across the border itself, with only the lowest ranking and least trusted members of the organization making the initial gruelling trek on offroading vehicles. By virtue of hazing the new guys, or maybe merely to implicate new members in the criminal activity of the militia to ensure loyalty, Mac and Jack have been shuffled into this group. And, because Mac failed to do his job in time, they'll be stuck actually going on this trip, at least until Mac can figure something out.

By the time they reach the point in the woods where they'll be leaving their cars, outside of a Northguard footsoldier's family cabin, Mac still has not figured something out. He's standing by the open door of their borrowed truck, trying to buy himself another few seconds by fiddling with something in the glove box, when he hears the voice of Owen Holte, calling out to the main group, which is headed away towards the offroading vehicles.

"Be there in a sec, gotta check something."

Luke Holte must take his son's word for it, because the footsteps continue crunching away, and Mac and Jack are left alone with Owen rapidly approaching. Snow has begun to fall, a light drift on the drive over that's increased to heavy flakes dropping through the air, clumped together and blurring the landscape. They catch and build up on the dark ski hat obscuring the blond hair of the man walking towards them, making it hard to make out the look on his face. Mac's shoulders tense and Jack takes a step like he's about to walk around the car to intercept him, but before either of them can say a word, Owen starts talking in a low hiss of a voice.

"Same person that sent Curtis sent you, right?"

Mac is almost too shocked to respond. They hadn't been able to figure out which of the twins had been the one to leave the note, but he supposes they now have their answer, Owen cutting Jack off halfway through the first word of whatever he'd been about to ask.

"Just _nod."_ They both nod, and so does Owen. He looks beyond anxious, eyes darting over his shoulder and back towards them, over and over on a loop. What he's doing right now obviously does not for a moment escape him, and he speaks fast and scared. "You're out of time. This is it. Back storage on my snowmobile, left compartment, wait until everyone else takes off." A beat of silence, and Owen's voice gets harsher in its hard whisper. "Just _nod_ if you _fucking understand me,_ okay?" Two more nods from Mac and Jack. Owen turns like he's about to walk back towards the offroading equipment, then looks back. "And make it look good. Please. If you want me to live through this, you have to make it look good."

There's no time to talk about it, to go over what they've just learned. There's no time to do anything but act. The wait until most of the Northguard have taken off, snowmobile engines sounding like chainsaws in the echoing, snow-cushioned wild, feels longer than Mac knows is possible. Jack's version of making it 'look good' turns out to be taking out the rear of Owen's snowmobile with the nose of his own, sending them both crashing into the snow. The others have all taken off ahead, leaving Mac and Jack to follow their path, and this leaves room for Mac to leap off his own vehicle and remove a small, well-fortified case from inside the storage compartment of Owen's wrecked rig.

Unfortunately, the sound is loud enough that it gets the attention of someone else. Specifically, it gets the attention of Will Anderson, who comes roaring back around the trees on his snowmobile, skidding to a halt in a Californian surf wave of fresh snowfall. Jack, who has climbed to his feet by now, an odd scrape across his face from where he'd likely hit something as he fell, gives Mac's shoulder a push.

"Go, go," he shouts, "I'll be right behind you, go!"

Mac doesn't have time to think, he just does it. He climbs up onto the last snowmobile and revs it on, heading back along the short trek towards the car. The corner of the case where he's zipped it into his jacket jabs into his collarbone. There was no other way to keep ahold of it while he drove, and it feels like he's got a live bomb zipped inside his coat, pressed to his chest so tight it can't possibly fall out. He's reached the car, waiting for Jack with a heart thundering so hard he's amazed it's not making a sound against the hard plastic of the case, when he hears it.

Engines. A shout. A gunshot. Two gunshots.

Mac is speeding back towards the side of the cabin before he's hardly registered it. All he knows is he has to find Jack and he has to find him now. The case presses into his chest, harder with each heave of his panicked lungs. He should leave. He should get to the car and leave, Jack said he'd be right behind him, he can hear James in his head screaming at him to leave, but he can't, because Jack isn't here and there was gunfire and he _can't find Jack._

At the cabin he turns the vehicle off and jumps off it, boots crunching loudly in the splintered crust of ice. After the gunshots things went quiet, far too quiet. There's no more shouting, no more sounds of a struggle. Just the hum of engines in the distance, some of which Mac could swear were growing closer. And he still can't find Jack.

The snow swirls around and around, like the thickest fog Mac has ever been in, and all he can see is white. White stretching out into an endless distance, shadowed in grey where flurries overlap each other and crash as if they were waves in a turbulent ocean. The entire landscape is white and it disorients him, spinning around and around for any kind of landmark, anything that could tell him which way was up and what was happening around it. He looks for it until he sees it, and the moment he does, he wishes he hadn't.

Red. There's blood on the snow, bright and accusing and easily one of the most terrifying things Mac has ever seen. The math does itself as it always has - quickly, accurately, and without asking.

Gunshots. A yell. Jack nowhere in sight. Blood.

Shot. Jack's been shot.

There's a lot of it, too, sprayed out over the snow, covered by fresh flakes that quickly join the crimson lake as the wet and heat of the fresh blood melts the new that's fallen over the top of it. Jack's been shot and if there's that much blood, he's dead, and if he isn't dead yet, he will be soon. Jack. Dead.

Jack's dead.

"Jack!" The name comes out devastated, ripped out of his throat by an unexpected freight train of desperate grief. He's too frightened to care, to rein it in or think about what it means that he's feeling this, that Jack has become an anchor without which he's afraid he'll come unmoored. He screams it again, voice echoing dully in the snow-cushioned landscape. "_Jack!"_

_Don't leave me don't leave me don'tleavemedon'tleaveme-_

"_JACK!"_

"Hey!"

The shout catches Mac's attention and he spins around, looking over the pool of blood to finally locate its source, the body on the ground half obscured by snow kicked up in a struggle. The body of Will Anderson, whose face is clearly visible, hand still curled around the gun he'd likely at some point in the last thirty seconds fired. And standing not twenty feet away from Anderson, walking towards him, gun lowered but still in a ready position, is Jack. Jack, who aside from the bruise rapidly blooming under the scrape on his face, looks completely fine.

All Mac wants is to run to him. He wants to run over and throw himself into Jack's arms, muffle violent, heaving sobs against his chest, feel the warmth of a strong, unharmed heart pushing vital blood through a living body. Before he can act on this impulse, or slam it down and lock it away where it can't betray the overinvestment he's just crashed into the shocking truth of the depth of, something interrupts.

Another gunshot blows a softball-sized chunk of ice and bark off a tree to Jack's left, jarring Mac's entire nervous system right to his core. Apparently, Anderson hadn't been the only threat, and he spins, trying to locate the source of the sound. A shout from by where the snowmobiles had been parked gets Mac's attention and he looks over to see Owen Holte, in time for the Northguard-turned-informant to yell again, "Look out he has a-" And then he falls, knocked back into the side of the cabin by the shotgun blast that catches him in the shoulder and the side of his chest.

Mac has heard all about Luke Holte's shotgun. He's heard the story at meal times in the main building more than once in the last week, how his father had carried the gun, had hunted holiday dinners and defended his property with it for decades before passing it down. How Holte never goes anywhere without it, slung across his shoulder in a proud tribute to the father who'd taught him the dubiously termed 'values' he built the Northguard from. The shotgun on his shoulder and the handgun on his hip, and now, in the moment between Holte shooting his son and comprehending what he's done enough to move and re-aim at the people he'd really been going for, Jack seems to find his opportunity.

In the blink of an eye, they're grappling in the snow, the handgun ripped from the holster and tossed several feet away. Mac moves for it, to pick it up before Holte can get loose from Jack and make a move for it again. He's stopped before he can get there by yet another voice, the final piece of how this is all going to end sliding to position when Holte's daughter clicks the safety off her gun.

"Get up," she says, a tremor in her voice. The weapon is pointed at Jack and Mac, echoes of the absolute terror he'd been swept away by when he'd seen that blood rolling over him like the waves of the frozen lake nearby, goes for his own. Grace stops him before he can, seeing the movement and shouting, rising to a wild pitch, "If you make a _move_ I will shoot Nylander right now I swear to God, don't try it. You, Nylander, let him go and get up."

"Grace, Jesus, _finally," _Holte snaps as he climbs to his feet, followed more warily by Jack.

Guided by the woman's gun, Jack walks slowly over until he and Mac are next to one another. Mac is frozen, fingers going numb even with gloves on, white flakes catching in his eyelashes and making him blink hard. The only sound is the sound of wet, short gasps coming from Owen, obviously not having been immediately fatally injured, but well on his way to losing his life if something isn't done, and done now. Grace's eyes flick around, landing frenetically and pinging away, Owen, Holte, Mac and Jack, Owen. Always back to Owen, her twin brother.

"What are you waiting for, girl, _shoot_ them. We leave the bodies in the lake and we make our sale and we finally have the capital to move the Northguard into something to be reckoned with. This is what we've built, now finish it so we can get what we deserve." It's a terrifying order, not only because of what Holte is instructing his daughter to do, but because of what comes next. Because of what the Northguard could become, if given the opportunity.

Grace makes no move to lower her gun but nor does she comply, and Mac knows he has to do something.

"You listen to your father when he gives you an order, now _do it!"_

"He shot your brother, Grace." The words move through numb lips, the first thing Mac can think of to say. "This man has shot your brother, and if we don't get Owen to a hospital soon, then he's going to die. I know he's your father but your twin is bleeding out. Are you going to let him?"

"Don't listen to him, he's the one that-"

The sound of Owen's labored breathing grows louder and he coughs, dragging in enough air to let out, "'S tr-", aborted half-syllables that end in another cough.

"Grace-"

"Shut up!" the young woman shouts at Holte, though her gun remains trained on Mac and Jack. "Owen. Owen, please." It's not clear what the please is for, what she's asking of her brother. Mac couldn't guess. He wants to step closer to Jack, but he can't move, like his shoes have frozen right into the snow under him.

"T-" Another violent cough, Owen curling over on his side, nearly toppling face-first into the snow. "True." Finally, the whole word makes its way out, and once it comes, it doesn't stop, tumbling over itself to repeat, "True. 'S true."

The snow sheets past, the only thing moving for a long, breathless moment. Then, slowly, Grace's gun swings in a simple pivot, until the barrel is pointed straight at Luke Holte. Mac's knees almost give out. Just like that, she's made her choice, and they aren't going to die today.

The arrest of Holte is quick work, Jack going straight for him, while Mac rushes to try and help Grace stop the blood. They leave Holte inside the cabin cuffed to a radiator, where he won't be exposed to the freezing air outside, cram Grace and Owen into the cramped backseat of the F150 and speed off towards Grand Marais. There's a hospital there, the only one in the area, according to Riley, who Mac gets on the range-boosted phone as soon as Jack puts the key in the ignition.

North Shore Hospital has a three bed emergency room and a staff of shocked medical professionals who were not expecting this kind of mess to roll into their lot in the middle of the day. The local police are called, and by the time Riley arrives with Evelyn, between talking to them and the medical staff and everything that's happened over the day that's finally catching up to him, Mac is about ready to fall down where he stands. Jack has guided him to a chair in the waiting room before he could and they're sitting there in silence when Riley explodes through the doorway.

Mac stands when he sees her and is rocked back with the force of the hug she greets him with, her arms tight around his shoulders. He hugs her back fiercely, ducking his face down and taking a deep breath. Her hair smells like the sharp winter outside, like snow and wind, but Riley is warm and solid and the long, hard embrace makes Mac feel a little less like he's about as steady as a snowflake, ready to splinter and dissolve at any moment. When they break apart, she turns and hugs Jack too, the first time Mac has seen her do so. He hadn't told her about those moments, the long and agonizing seconds where he'd believed Jack had been shot dead, but she has obviously been carrying fear of her own, and it reminds Mac of his own instinct in the woods, the desperate, relieved hug he'd never acted on.

"I spoke to the doctors," Evelyn tells them when she catches up to the group. "They say that Owen Holte is going to pull through, there should be no permanent damage except some pretty nasty scarring." She explains the extent of his injuries, which had been severe but ultimately nonlethal. Some of the buckshot pellets had hit the side of his neck, which was the most alarming for the emergency staff, and Mac compulsively puts a hand over his own neck, palm pressed to his own scar tissue. Nobody but Jack seems to notice, the man shooting him an odd look, which Mac waves off with the barest shake of his head.

"What's gonna happen to them?" Mac asks after a moment. "Owen and Grace Holte?"

It's been dogging him the entire time they've been here, that moment beside the cabin in the snow, where Grace had made her choice, chosen Owen over Holte and turned her gun on her father. Her _father. _The man who by all accounts had controlled her entire world, ran the cult-like militia she was entrenched in, ordered her around, spoke to both she and her brother in the same frozen steel tone Mac has heard his whole life... That man had been standing right there, ordering her to shoot the two men responsible for destroying everything, and she hadn't done it.

Mac can't stop seeing it. The slow, petrified but decisive swing of that gun, the move that had saved his life and Jack's. Owen's too.

"They've both agreed to turn state's witness. The charges against them will likely be dropped, I don't think either of them will see jail time," Evelyn says, no indication of how she feels about that in her voice. "The Canadians should probably also be open to a deal, when we inform them of how things have developed."

The Minnesotan agent keeps talking, but most of it floats over Mac's head. He sits back down and tries to let his body relax somewhat in the hard, barely cushioned waiting room chair. Outside the window, the snow keeps falling, blurring any landscape that may have lay far beyond it. It feels like they've been here for a month, a year, not a week, so long he's forgotten what it's like to feel warm. The side of his neck aches and Mac keeps a palm over it, trying to bring some heat to the scar that's troubling him.

"You ready?" The voice brings him back from wherever he's drifted to, and Mac blinks hard, head snapping over to look at Jack.

The sight of him standing there, looking tired but at ease, face scraped but otherwise perfectly unharmed, brings a lump suddenly into Mac's throat, and he has a hard time catching his breath. His eyes sting and he blinks them hard, pressing the heels of his hands over them as he asks wordlessly, "Hmm?"

"To go home?"

Home. _Home._ Mac nods fiercely, coughing and clearing his throat. "Yeah," he says, and is pleased at how steady it comes out sounding. "Please. Let's go home."


	25. Show Me How To Lay My Sword Down

i am NOT happy with how long this took to finish. i just finished my first semester of grad school and that, i think, broke my brain for a while. anyhow here i am! belated holiday greetings: chag sameach, happy hanukkah, and a merry christmas to anybody out there celebrating that.

chapter warnings: discussion of a semi-detailed nature of how mac got the scar in his neck. involves gun violence. also, discussion of the death of a parent.

(chapter title from sleeping at last's 'atlas: eight')

* * *

If Bozer were asked to list all of the reasons he doesn't like Mac's job, it would be a pretty lengthy list. The fact that he doesn't have any clear idea of what it actually is ranks pretty highly, and so do days like these ones. Long, uncertain, off-kilter days where Mac is just gone, off somewhere he can't talk about with no real idea when he's going to be home. Sometimes it's a day, sometimes it's a week, one time it was almost three weeks. Bozer doesn't like to think about that one - Mac barely said a word for several days after he got home.

It's not like Mac is the only person Bozer ever hangs out with. His parents don't live too far away, it's a driveable trip in less than half a day and he'd spent a weekend with them just after Mac left, catching up on their respective lives and learning alongside his dad a new trick his mom had just figured out with pie crust. He's got a Dungeons and Dragons group that meets every other week, and a writer's feedback circle he stumbled onto at his favorite local coffee shop. There's a poet, three novelists, another screenwriter, and a memoirists, and Bozer likes them immensely. He'd had two of them, the poet and one of the novelists, over to watch some deliberately bad movies and make fun of the non-existent continuity just two days ago. But having Mac gone like this, it's different.

The house feels empty and echoing, nobody sleeping on the couch every other day when he gets up in the morning, other car still and untouched in the driveway. There's some significant, crucial piece of Bozer's life that just isn't there, and it feels off. Never mind the worry that eats away at his mind, wondering what kind of injury Mac is going to come home lying about this time. Will it be something like a bruise, low on his jaw or high on his arm, or will it be worse? Or will it be another thick pad of white gauze, taped over the curve of his neck down onto the top of his shoulder, removed after a few days to reveal fresh scarring, explained away with a car accident, an IED that blew Mac's transport car off the road.

He still doesn't know if he believes that explanation. Doesn't know what the alternative might be, and most of the time doesn't want to know. If there's one small, small mercy to this charade Mac keeps up about his job, about the 'think tank' he works for that Bozer is sure doesn't actually exist, it's that whatever Mac actually does, he doesn't know about it. There's a timer counting down on the lie, Bozer is sure they both know there is, and for the moment, he supposes he'll allow himself to hope that whatever he's imagining, it's much worse than the truth. Whatever that turns out to be.

This trip is longer than the average. It's more than a week before Bozer hears the by-now familiar sound of Jack's car, pulling up to the sidewalk outside. He scrapes the sheaf of papers he'd been working on together off the cushions of the couch, depositing them on his desk and making it into the front hallway just in time to open the door before Mac can.

They stand there for a moment, silent on either side of the threshold, and then Mac crumples. He lurches forward and Bozer steps quickly to meet him, stumbling back just far enough to bring them both into the house. Bozer fumbles one hand blindly around until he catches the edge of the door, shoving it just hard enough to encourage it to swing and latch closed, then turns his full attention to Mac.

Mac's face is currently buried against the front of Bozer's shirt, holding on with one arm while the other seems to have lost momentum halfway there, fingers caught and hanging onto the open side of Bozer's hoodie. His posture, curved and cracked at the foundation, has erased the five or so inches Mac has on him in height, leaving him seeming small and wounded, and Bozer's grip tightens around him in response. The hug feels exhausted and desperate, like Mac is putting the last reserves of strength he has in him after whatever he's been doing in the last week or so into it.

These are the moments, even more than when Mac is gone for days, even more than when he comes back with butterfly bandages over some cut on his arm and a limp he thinks he's hiding, that Bozer is the most afraid. The most certain that, one day, this secret job is going to take his best friend away from him for good, and all he's gonna be left with is some cover story he won't know what parts of to believe. One day all he'll have left is a million questions, not even a body to bury.

Or, in an option leaving Bozer wondering which one is worse, as he stands there hugging Mac so tightly he can feel the tiny tremors running through him, all that's left of Mac will be a body. He'll come home one day and this job, whatever he does on James MacGyver's orders, will have taken the last piece of him that made him who he is, and he'll spend the rest of his life a shell. He'll be lost somewhere he won't ever return from and Bozer won't have the tools to even start looking.

For now, though, Bozer thinks, blond hair brushing his chin and the force of someone else's living, breathing lungs expanding and contracting pushing at his chest, he still has time. There's still time to find Mac before he's lost for good, one way or another, and Bozer is nothing if not determined. And besides. He's got a distinct feeling he's got a powerful ally in Jack Dalton now, and for the first time in a long time, he feels like the scales might be tipping, away from James and whatever he's pulled Mac into and back towards home.

By the time Mac sniffs and clears his throat, stepping back and looking away, he's still shaking. Shivering, somehow, despite it being as warm in the house as it always is. He looks embarrassed, about what Bozer can only begin to guess, and so he does what he does best in these moments, when there's something going on in Mac's head he can't talk about that is clearly causing him pain.

Bozer puts on his most determined smile, grabs his roommate by the arm, and pulls them both deeper into the house. There's a two thousand piece puzzle on the coffee table, cut into pieces barely larger than a quarter, and Bozer has been picking at it for the better part of the duration of Mac's latest trip. He gently pushes Mac down onto the couch and takes a seat beside him, launching into how he was pretty sure this particular puzzle, a landscape of a sunlit grassy hillside and a powder blue sky dotted by colorful kites, was designed by someone with the specific goal of making people lose their minds trying to complete it.

For a long moment, Mac just looks at the puzzle, and Bozer gets an odd feeling. His sentence, by that point having lost track of what he was actually talking about, rambles down into silence, just watching Mac's face.

"What is it?" Bozer asks eventually, rather than what he wants to ask. Rather than 'where did you go on that trip', rather than 'where did you go just now', rather than 'what the hell happened out there'. Rather than 'what can I say to get you to quit'. "What's going on, Mac?"

A long, distinct shudder rolls over Mac's shoulders, and he blinks hard. He tears his eyes off the puzzle and looks over to Bozer, and the smile he wears is barely deserving of the word.

"It's fine, Boze," he says, voice light and very clearly a lie. "I just haven't seen a lot of sun this week, is all. It snowed the whole time, basically, we just… Anyway. Let's see if we can make some progress, shall we?"

They work in quiet for a while on the puzzle, until Mac's hands waver over the board enough times in a row that Bozer knows he's about to fall asleep sitting up. Just before he can be the one to admit he's tired and they both ought to head to bed, Mac himself straightens up, putting a sky piece with the edge of a yellow kite back down on the table. He takes the words right out of Bozer's mouth, and they come out in an exhausted mumble, muffled behind his hands, that they should both go to sleep.

He doesn't move, though. Doesn't get up off the couch to shuffle back to his room, hiding away like he does sometimes after trips like this, the ones where it takes hours for all of him to completely return. Instead he sits there, head tipping back and hands falling from his face to land in his lap. Mac's attention rolls to the size and he watches the Los Angeles sky out over the porch, the rest of the city alive and expanding forever outside their house.

"Are you okay?" Bozer can't help but ask the question, though he isn't in the least bit optimistic he'll actually get any kind of honest answer. To his surprise, Mac looks right back to him, and after a long, heavy pause, he responds.

"We almost lost Jack."

Bozer feels suddenly as cold as Mac looks, and his throat goes so dry he can't force out a response. There is so much information both present and missing from that sentence, and he doesn't even know how to begin responding to it. An odd impulse grips him and Bozer just barely refrains from going for his phone, calling Jack himself just to hear the voice of the man he's grown to like so immensely. But Mac had said 'almost' and so he's got more pressing things to worry about, like the fact that his roommate looks like he's about six inches from having a breakdown the likes of which Bozer hasn't seen out of him since his first security detail had been killed. Before Bozer can regain the ability to talk, to figure out what to say next, Mac repeats himself.

"We almost-" There's a sudden, cracking instability in his voice, and he stops, swallowing visibly. A tremor quakes his lower lip and Mac looks away, down at his hands. "Something went wr- went wrong. On the job we were out on. It was really close, and Jack… One minute he was right there next to me and the next I thought he was just gone. I thought he was dead."

Mac is talking vaguely, avoiding specifics, and the ferocity with which Bozer hates Mac's job in that moment is loud and hot. It's obvious, in the tone of his voice, the shaking that comes and goes in strength, that Mac is very upset, and yet he can't even truly talk about it. He can't explain what he'd seen, why exactly he'd thought Jack had been killed, and thereby can't process it, at least not here and not now.

Only one of Mac's security details had been killed before, and when Mac could bring himself to talk about it at all, he'd only ever said it had been an IED. That had been the day Bozer knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing he was being told about Mac's job was true, and that one day, it could send Mac home in a box. It's eased his mind and his heart, having met Jack and gotten to know him over the last few months. It's made him just that much less scared that any moment he's gonna get a phone call from James MacGyver, and end up at a funeral with a hundred questions that will never see answers. But if Jack dies…

"Y'know what the worst part is?" Mac asks the question in a quiet, distracted tone like he's not entirely aware he's still talking out loud. He's staring out at middle-distance now, somewhere beyond the porch, and Bozer wonders what he's seeing. Where he's gone back to. "After I got done being scared he was gone, and we were on our way back here, I realized what that meant. Exactly what him being- being gone like that would mean, and I… I don't know. I got scared all over again. I'm still scared, and I don't know how to handle this, because I just… I don't want him to go."

It's barely audible, the admission, and an embarrassed flush sits high on Mac's cheeks. He won't look at Bozer, even after he's said it, hands twisting white-knuckled in his lap like he's just confessed some terrible secret. And now it's not Mac's job Bozer hates but his father. He wants to get up and walk out of the house, he wants to drive to where James lives and do… something. Something to make him understand what he's done to his son's ability to trust, to love, to feel anything . Make him understand and then make him pay.

Bozer clenches a hand into an achingly tight fist and then releases it deliberately, extending his fingers one by one until he's calm enough that the anger won't show in his voice.

"I don't think he's going anywhere," he says, and it's the truth. All indications Bozer's seen so far say that wild horses wouldn't drag Jack away now. Bozer hasn't seen anyone look at Mac like that in a long time. Protective and proud. Paternal.

"He may not plan to," Mac goes so far as to admit, and that's a larger leap of progress than Bozer thinks he's entirely aware it is, "but he may not get offered the choice."

There's nothing Bozer can really say to that, mostly because it's true.

* * *

It's a beautiful day in Los Angeles. Jack can't stop looking out over as much of the horizon as he can see, face turned up into the welcoming warmth of the sun's beams. It's warm for this time of year, seventy degrees with a light wind, and normally, Jack wouldn't be wearing any kind of coat. He's opted for a light jacket today, though, still dogged by the memory of the bitterly frigid temperatures in Northern Minnesota. Mac seems to be feeling much the same way, coat pulled close around his body, arms folded tight across his chest. He's got an odd look on his face, glancing around at their surroundings, and Jack supposes he can't be blamed for it.

"So," he says, hefting the picnic basket he'd packed before he picked Mac up onto his other arm, "I bet you're probably wondering why I brought you here."

"Yeah," Mac says, the word drawn out as he raises his eyebrows at Jack. "It's a cemetery, man, it's a little weird." He doesn't sound as sarcastic or amused as he probably would under normal circumstances, if the mission they'd just come off hadn't been the way it had. As it stands, he's subdued and quiet, not making any joking prods at Jack about his chosen location for a picnic. His shoulders are curved down and his posture is nothing of its normal near-military rigidity. Mac is exhausted. He looks like the walking wounded, and that's partially why Jack's brought him here today. The other reason, well.

Jack's eyes flick down to scan headstones when he knows he's almost at the right one, and stops in front of his intended destination.

"I figured," he says, beginning the explanation as he billows out a truly cliched checkered red and white picnic blanket to spread over the grass near the foot of the grave, "since you trusted me enough to let me come meet your family - say hello to Bozer for me by the way, he still owes me a Sorry! rematch - I should probably introduce you to mine." Jack sits down slowly, giving his knees time to adjust, until he's leaned back against the massive marble wall behind him, spanning some ten feet and at least a foot thick. It's anchored into the ground and he's not worried about knocking it over by resting against it. "Mac, I want you to meet my dad, Jack Dalton Senior. Dad, this is Mac, my partner at DXS."

For a long moment, disturbed only by the breeze and the sound of a car on the long driveway some hundred or so feet away, passing and quickly fading into the distance, Mac says nothing. He stands next to the picnic blanket, shifting from foot to foot, and looks from Jack, to the headstone, and back again.

"Well, come on, sit down and say hi. Don't be rude." Jack keeps his voice light and conversational, patting the picnic blanket next to him.

With halting, uncertain movements, Mac does as he's told and sits down, easing back incrementally until he too is reclined against the massive slab of stone. He looks at the carved name in front of them, and Jack follows his line of sight, reading it as well, although he knows what it says. Jack S. Dalton Sr, of the United States Air Force.

"I thought you were from Texas?" As soon as he says it, Mac cringes like he regrets it. It seems for a moment, his mouth slightly parted and his chest rising with a large inhale and the preparation for a thousand walkbacks and apologies.

"I am," says Jack before he can start. He doesn't mind answering questions about his life, not when it's Mac asking them. "But my dad wasn't. He grew up here, and when he was in the Air Force, he spent a long time stationed out here too. See about three headstones down that way," he points to the right, down the rows of graves, to another familiar one, "is my Uncle Sean. Sean Tolliver, they were stationed together, served together for years. My dad, was an only child. Never had brothers or sisters, and his parents passed away when I was pretty young - they're buried out here too. Pretty sure there was nobody, aside from my mom, that my dad was closer to than Sean. And then, a couple years before my dad got sick, Sean was in an accident, and we lost him. So when dad passed away, my mom decided to have a headstone put up for him in the family plot in Texas so she'd have somewhere to visit, but decided to have him buried out here. Where he grew up, where most of his family was."

Jack looks around, at the green of the grass and the pale sunlight breathing life into the clear, infinite blue sky. It's not a bad place to spend eternity, he thinks, the slightest tang of salt from the ocean never quite gone from the air. His dad had loved California - maybe that's part of why Jack himself had ultimately landed out here.

"Anyway," he says, breathing from the reverie. "I come out here and talk to him whenever things go bad, whenever I manage to almost beef it on a mission." Jack shrugs, shelving the look on Mac's face at the reminder of his near-death experience to unpack later. For just a moment, Mac's face had screwed up in a look of hurt and fear, like he might be about to cry. But it's gone just as fast, and Jack isn't out to try and make him cry today. "He's good at keeping secrets, my pops, y'know, won't breathe a word to anyone. Wanted to introduce the two of you. Bring you out here to say hi."

"Well, then, I guess, h- Um." Mac clears his throat, shoots a glance at Jack, and tries again, a deep frown creased in his face as he speaks to the stone. "Hi, Mr. Dalton. I'm, uh. Mac. It's nice to meet you."

It's sweet, really, how sincerely he's trying. There's a look of earnest seriousness on his face and it makes Jack's heart give a sharp squeeze, a kind of ache he's getting used to around Mac, these days. It's an ache that speaks to a deep fondness, and a distance between them that Jack just doesn't know how to bridge. Mac is more than just his partner, just the nepotism kid Jack had been assigned to protect. He's someone Jack has come to love fiercely, and he is in a kind of pain that Jack is only just beginning to think he's catching glimpses of.

The ache in his chest only surges again with what Mac says next, quiet and unprompted, just spoken straight out into the air with an awkwardness that only serves to bolster its sincerity.

"My mom got sick, too." Mac's hands are twisting in his lap, eyes cast down from Jack Sr's headstone to his own crossed ankles, stretched out in front of him. "She died when I was little." It's some kind of odd, uncertain olive branch of sorts, a hand held out in understanding and solidarity of having lost a parent the same way Jack did. For a moment, Jack closes his eyes, and a small, out of place smile almost makes its way onto his face.

Instead, he reaches out, following an impulse before he can talk himself out of it, laying a hand high on Mac's far shoulder, palm half on his neck. Jack squeezes lightly, then leaves his hand there, holding the side of Mac's neck in a loose grip. There's something of an odd feeling under his touch, and it takes Jack a moment to figure out what it means, and when he does, he goes completely, totally still.

It's the scar on Mac's neck, creeping down onto his shoulder. Jack's got his hand right on top of that scar. This has the potential to go very, very badly and so Jack opts to continue holding still, practically not breathing, while he waits to see what Mac is going to do. Mac has also gone still, not shifting at all beneath the touch, but he also doesn't jerk away. Strangest of all, the thing Jack finds the most eye-opening and hopeful, he didn't flinch. Jack has his hand, bare skin pressed to knotted scar tissue, on the place where somehow, sometime, someone's violent action had nearly taken Mac's life. And he hadn't flinched.

So, heart beating loud in his own chest, Mac's pulse faintly, barely distinguishable under Jack's thumb, he decides to take another risk. Leaving his hand where it is, he asks, in a mild, casual-as-possible voice, "Does it still hurt?"

Neither of them need clarify what he's asking about.

"Sometimes," Mac says, tired and strange. "I get aches. Especially when it's cold. Like, really cold."

"Oh."

Jack thinks about Minnesota, about sheets of snow fluttering down like the down of a burst pillow covers a bedspread. About a temperature gauge reading negative thirty, and Mac's hand, up near his head, prodding and massaging under the collar of his coat. He lets his thumb begin moving, sweeping in gentle strokes over the side of Mac's neck, the devastating wound under it strange and uneven against the rest of his skin. Mac shivers a little, a tremor running through his body under Jack's hand, but he still doesn't give any indication he wants that hand off him. If anything, he's leaning slightly against it, pushing into the touch.

"It happened in Sweden."

The explanation comes like the one about his mother had, unasked for and freely given. Jack keeps moving his thumb, back and forth in a small pattern, but otherwise does not move, doesn't make a sound. He's afraid if he changes anything, Mac will spook, and they'll never get through the conversation they both need to happen. Mac keeps talking.

"I was with my partner at the time, Karen English, we were on a job in Stockholm. I was working in an alley, while Karen kept a lookout. It was supposed to be easy, but we hadn't been working together too long, and I was nervous. I kept getting distracted, focusing on stuff I shouldn't have been, taking my eyes off my goal. Eventually both she and my dad got sick of it. I had my dad yelling at me through comms in one ear, and my partner yelling at me from the end of the alley in the other so I just. I focused. She had the perimeter, they were both pissed, time was running out so I had to focus."

The breath that Mac draws in is deep and heavy enough that Jack can feel it. It shakes too, another tremor running through him, and Jack's thumb goes still, his grip tightening just enough to remind Mac that they're here, together, in the cemetery in Los Angeles. They aren't in an alley in Stockholm. It's a strange, fleeting hope, but maybe, just as he'd done when he'd sat at the edge of the bed and stroked his hand over the back of Mac's head where he'd been struck by Will Anderson, Jack thinks maybe the warm, gentle press of his palm over that scar might do something to take some of the pain away from the memory of its infliction. It probably won't. But Jack has to at least try to tip the scales.

"She walked away to deal with something else. I still don't know what it was. But she didn't tell me she was leaving, and when I heard footsteps, I thought they were her. Next thing I knew, I'd been shot. I almost bled out, I was in intensive care for days. Nicked my jugular I guess."

Jack doesn't have any trouble believing that. He can feel the scope of the scar himself, imagine the damage it must have done when it was fresh. It's a terrifying thought, for a whole host of reasons, and Jack himself can't suppress a shudder. Mac's shoulder, the one closest to Jack, the one he isn't in contact with, moves up and down in a small shrug.

"I never saw Karen again. My dad was pissed at us both, but her a little more than me I guess, so he fired her on the spot. I don't know where she ended up."

"He shouldn't have been mad at you at all." The words are out before Jack can think about whether or not they're a good idea, and honestly, a large part of him doesn't care. Mac needs to hear this, and Jack needs to say it. "He was more mad at her, whatever, you got shot Mac, because you trusted your partner. He had no business being mad at you at all."

Mac doesn't answer. He doesn't concede the point but he doesn't refute it either, and though his trapezius muscle goes tense under Jack's hand, he leans into it just a fraction harder, too. Jack lets his thumb move again, like he could wipe away the memory of that blood-drenched alley, the memory of James MacGyver's indefensible anger. And even if he can't, give Mac something else to frame his world by, a different factor for the equation he's constantly using to calculate the odds of things going for better or for worse.

They sit there together for a while longer, the sound of the breeze rustling in the branches of a nearby tree the only sound breaking the calm of the day. Soon, Jack will open the picnic basket and distribute sandwiches, pickles and spear slices of bell pepper. But for right now, at least, he can't bring himself to move yet. So he sits there, keeping his gentle hold on Mac's neck, and allow the warmth of progress to chase away lingering memories of snow.


	26. Freedom (And A Little Less Pain)

_me writing this chapter: aw nuts this is gonna be a short one probably :(_

_this chapter: sike i'm 5k_

_me: I MEAN. I GUESS?_

_have fun everyone thank you so much for sticking with this project of mine! i can't overstate how much i value hearing from you, it makes my day. enjoy!_

_(title from light's song 'new fears' this chapter.)_

* * *

Whoever decided to put bulletproof glass in this lab is currently at the top of Mac's personal shit-list. They just barely beat out the woman who had taken that lab hostage in order to obtain several highly volatile compounds for use in the creation of a dirty bomb - the _second_ group hellbent on a dirty bomb that they've dealt with this year, and Mac does not at all enjoy that statistic. Though, depending on how long this standoff lasts, with a civilian scientist hiding behind a desk, Mac with his gun drawn, and the hostage taker pointing a gun right back at him, the ranking of 'who is ruining my day the most at this particular moment' could easily change.

For now, it's still the designer who'd made the sliding doors – locked and sealed – out of glass that withstood Jack's attempt to break it with first the hardened piece of steel at the end of his closed knife and then with a well-aimed bullet. Because that's why Mac is currently stuck entirely in charge of dealing with this situation, one that is really better suited to Jack's particular skillset. Standing down an armed hostage taker who seems to be devolving by the minute is not Mac's niche in this partnership. His first shot had missed when Reed, their bad guy du jour, dodged to the side to slam the button that sealed them off just as Jack had rounded the corner to intervene.

Mac can still feel it, the moment he'd squeezed the trigger just that hair's breadth hard enough and the weapon had fired. It buzzes under his index finger, poised and ready to do it again as soon as he figures out an angle that won't risk the scientist in the corner, who sits solidly in Reed's sights. It's a bad feeling. Mac can't remember the last time he'd had to actually shoot his gun on a mission – usually, he does everything possible to circumvent that eventuality, and especially since Jack was hired, he really hasn't needed to even consider it. Not with someone else a step behind him, sights up at all times.

Not this time, though. This time, that one step behind him had been one step too many, and now he's locked in a bulletproof room with a hostage and a woman who'd decided the best way to make her point was with a dirty bomb in a densely populated city. And things were going bad fast. Mac needs to act, and he needs to act now, but he just can't bring himself to pull the trigger for a second time. Not with the first still humming in his palm and Dr. Monique Robbins hiding behind her desk, square in Reed's line of fire.

There's something about Reed, also, that's giving him pause. Maybe it's the adrenaline of the whole situation, surely coursing through her just as strongly as it's hitting him, but there's something off about the way she aims the gun. First and foremost, is the fact that she hasn't fired it yet. There had been a split second when the door sealed shut and Jack's shouting was reduced to muffled background noise, when Mac's attention had been elsewhere. Just a split second, and then he'd turned back, but it was long enough that any semi-trained killer would've taken the opening. Which means that, for whatever reason, Reed is not a shoot first ask questions later type of hostage taker. This is just fine with Mac, because it leaves him with options.

He knows what James would tell him to do. He can hear it as clearly as if the man were standing right next to him, iron grip on his shoulder pinching poorly healed nerves from the incident in Stockholm he'd just told Jack about not two weeks ago, hissing in his ear.

Do it. Take the shot. Pull the fucking trigger, Angus, what are you _waiting_ for? You've been taught better than this.

But, as he'd done that day in Minnesota in the snow when he knew he should've run for the truck, as he's been doing more and more these days, Mac doesn't obey. He hears the echo of James in his ear, and he tells it _no._ There's another way. This isn't how I do things.

"Reed," he calls out. The woman's gaze flicks from Dr. Robbins and then back. She still doesn't fire, and the end of her pistol wavers, traces a small pattern in the air. Barely, but it happens, and so Mac pushes harder, tries again. "Josephine Reed. That's your first name, right? Is it Josephine or Jo?"

For a long moment it doesn't look like it's going to work. Reed's grip tightens, the fraction of a movement noticeable in the way Mac's vision seems to have gone high-def, picking up even the smallest hint of a change in their narrowed, sealed environment. Time has slowed to a crawl. Green eyes flash over to him again, and then, the answer.

"Jo," she says, too loud, voice grated out through a sandpaper throat. "It's Jo."

Progress. It's progress. It might not seem like much but every time he can get her talking, he's going to get more information, and if he wants to get everybody out of this alive, he needs all the information he can get. Aside from the very obvious motive of 'I would really, _really_ like to not shoot someone today', Mac also knows they need Reed alive for more than just his own reasons. If they lose her, they lose their best window of insight into her organization, and their best shot at intercepting their plan B, should they have one.

That answer didn't really give him much, but the way she said it did, the uncontrolled pitch and volume of her voice when she spoke. This isn't some ice-cold assassin, no military-trained sharpshooter or radicalized grassroots militia member. This isn't someone who is comfortable or familiar with killing, and Mac sees an opening. He keeps his gun up, trying to ignore the way it feels alive and angry in his hands, but loosens his grip on the trigger.

"I'm Mac," he says, wrestling his nerves under control to keep his voice steady and calm. "You used to work here, right? As a security guard? Did you know Dr. Robbins?" Reed's gun wavers again, and he knows he's on the right track. Mac has hit on something important.

Oddly, what's running through his mind right now is a training session they'd done with Riley last week. Jack had been walking her through the basics of negotiation, the very simplest overview of how to talk people down and diffuse impossible situations.

They'd even gotten to a few scenario run-throughs, with Mac at one point agreeing to play a civilian hostage to give her something of a sense of what that kind of situation was like in real time. He can still feel Jack's arm, heavy over his shoulder and across the front of his chest holding him close in a human shield, the press of Jack's fingers at the side of his head in an imitation weapon. It should've felt intolerably unsafe, it should've triggered some innate fight or flight, sent Mac's elbow back into Jack's solar plexus allowing him to break free before he'd remembered where he was and what he was doing.

That hadn't been what happened. Instead, Mac had held very still, trying hard to blink back a highly unanticipated stinging in his eyes and fiercely ignoring that this was the closest he'd ever gotten to hugging Jack. Ignoring even harder that, paradoxically, it's just about the safest he's ever felt.

Out of all of what had happened during that afternoon, there's one piece of Jack's advice to Riley that Mac is focusing on at the moment. He can hear it as if Jack is speaking to him now, standing next to him rather than trapped twenty feet away by that godforsaken sealed glass door.

There are different types of people, and they naturally make different types of threats, Jack had said. There are going to be exceptions, obviously, there always are, but generally, the way a person poses a threat says a lot about them. A sniper isn't likely to stab you. A hacker isn't likely to pick up a gun.

A bomber isn't likely to be extremely comfortable with killing someone up-close. Bombing, especially bombing meant to send some kind of big message, is a distant, detached way to end a life. Sure they can watch, but by necessity from a distance, and there is something far more personal about looking a person in their eyes from less than a room's length away as you end their life. And everything he's seeing right now in Reed is telling him they're dealing with a bomber through and through, someone with a message who believed the ends outweighed the means, but was struggling with the idea of getting blood on her hands directly.

It reminds him of Owen Holte, who had pulled the plug on his father's weapons smuggling when the risk to the public grew too great, too direct.

"Did you know Monique when you worked here?" he repeats, through the question forcing Reed to acknowledge the person on the other end of her gun as that – a person. He'd told her his name, and now used Dr. Robbins' first name, personalizing them both as much as possible.

"No. I don't know her," Reed finally answers, and Mac curses internally. That would've been a decent point of leverage to play off her humanity. But just as he's thinking this, another voice joins the dialogue. Dr. Robbins herself speaks up, still hiding behind her desk, hands over her head.

"I remember you," the scientist says with a small, thready voice. "I mean, not directly, but-" Dr. Robbins chokes and stops, clearing her throat before going on. Mac can't see any part of her from his angle aside from the toe of one purple sneaker and the ends of a few of her braids, decorated with colorful beads. The braids waver and then still again as she continues, "The day security guy, Tom. He was sad when you left, said you brought him coffee on shift change. He said you were a good coworker."

It's a display of unbelievable bravery, that this civilian research chemist has even a fraction of the composure and wherewithal to speak directly to the person pointing a gun at her. And it works. What she says seems to shake Reed even further, the gun bobbing up and down as she lowers it slightly then raises it back up again. Out of the corner of his eye, Mac catches sight of Jack, outside in the hallway, his own weapon out but lowered by his hip, ready just in case but, practically speaking, useless. He tries to put something reassuring into his expression, communicate to Jack through the glass that he has this under control.

"I know you're angry. You've got a message, and this is how you've decided to spread it." By killing at minimum hundreds of people, probably several thousand, and sending shockwaves through the international world. But Mac can't let how he feels about this show on his face. Not when he's trying to at least make it seem like he empathizes with her. "There are a lot of people out there who agree with you, too. Now I could stand here all day long and tell you that this bomb isn't the way to send your message, but I know there's no point in that. You wouldn't have gotten this far if you could just be talked out of it."

"You're damn right I won't be talked out of it," Reed says, and Mac's nerves jangle loudly, like he's just made a huge mistake. She seems more resolved now, less thrown, and that could either be a very good or a very bad thing.

"Then you've also got to understand that the road ends here," he tells her, banking on this being true. "There's no way this ends with you walking out of here with what you need for your bomb. Even if you manage to shoot both of us, there's only one way out of this lab, and my partner is on the other end of it. You wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell- a snow_flake's_ chance in hell of making it past him. The only way you walk out of this at all, and any part of your message makes it out, is if you put the gun down."

A bead of sweat trickles down the back of Mac's neck, and the tension in his body sends an ache pulsing through his scar. He's taken a massive gamble here and if it backfires, the consequences will be massive. The room is still and silent and the air feels like it's getting heavier by the moment. Reed doesn't move, except for her eyes, which dart across to the door to look at Jack, then return to Dr. Robbins, jittery and fast. Then something catches her attention, something on Dr. Robbins's desk.

Slowly, while Mac's heart beats so hard in his chest he can almost hear it, Reed's finger slips off the trigger, and the gun goes down. Inch by inch, the gun goes down.

The wave of relief in Mac is so strong it almost takes him to his knees right there. He feels somehow even closer to the verge of panic now than he did when he'd pulled shot at Reed, than the entirety of the negotiation. Her gun hits the table and Mac shuts down, focuses entirely on getting through the next minutes, the next seconds. As soon as Reed's hand is off the gun he moves, snatching it and sticking it into his own waistband, then lurching over to slam the button that unlocked and opened the door with a gentle hiss of air.

Jack takes over from there, taking custody of Reed and securing her hands behind her back with zip-cuffs. Mac walks over to Dr. Robbins, helping her to her feet. She's saying something to him, some expression of terrified gratitude, but Mac can't quite hear her over the ringing in his ears. He finds his eyes inexplicably drawn to the same place Reed had been looking when she finally gave up, and that's when he sees it. The framed picture on the desk, of Dr Robbins, another woman, and a little girl with the same beaded box braids as the doctor wears. The implication is immediate and obvious, and Mac almost goes down for a second time, white-knuckle clutching at the edge of the desk.

So much didn't happen here today. So much _could_ have happened here today, and he feels it as surely as he'd feel the whistle of air as a bullet passed so closely to his head that it grazed his hair.

The next hour passes in a blur that Mac barely registers, until he's sitting in the backseat of a car taking them towards their exfil location. A touch on his hand gets his attention, and he looks over as Riley presses her palm against his, lacing their fingers together. He responds in kind, hanging onto her so tight he's almost worried he's going to hurt her. She increases her own grip in response, and Mac feels a lump rise suddenly in his throat.

Closing his eyes, Mac tries to focus on Riley's hand, to put thoughts of guns and bombs and Jo Reed and the picture of Dr. Robbins's smiling, round-cheeked daughter out of his head.

* * *

From outside the lab, Jack hadn't been able to make out any of the words being spoken inside it. If he'd focused, he'd likely have been able to lipread at least Mac's half of the conversation, but that kind of attention to detail was nowhere near justified for the sake of understanding the words exchanged. Not when there were so many other factors in the air.

It's one of the most frustrating and anxiety-inducing situations he's been in since starting this job, being trapped outside while a situation unfolded involving two guns, Mac, and a random scientist. In the allocation of duties between their partnership, this kind of thing belonged squarely in his court, and to not even be able to _help_ is anathema to his very existence.

When Mac somehow, _somehow_ talks their bomber down and opens the door, Jack is so proud he could have yelled it through a megaphone if one had made itself available. _That's my boy,_ he'd thought triumphantly, and then staunchly refused to interrogate the phrasing of that thought. He said what he said, and he meant it. Well. He thought what he thought, and- the intent is clear anyway.

Mac himself is markedly less excited. In fact, he barely says a word all the way back to Los Angeles. Jack sees in the rearview mirror in the car that he and Riley are holding hands, clinging to each other with a degree of desperation that gives him pause. There's no good moment to check in on him, not in the car, not on the flight home, and once they arrive, Jack quickly loses track of him. One moment they're deplaning, the next he's standing in the hall at DXS with absolutely no idea where his partner's disappeared to.

Having already sent Riley off home with a promise that he'll check on Mac and give her an update later, Jack wanders around the building. He finds no trace of Mac down any hallway or in any conference room, and a thought springs into his head as he walks past the hall of Directors that if he finds Mac and James has him backed into some corner, shouting at him for whatever reason he's pulled out of his ass today, Jack is not going to be responsible for what he does. He's still daydreaming about exactly how good it would feel to sock his boss in the jaw when his distracted wander almost sends him straight into Matty.

"Head in the clouds, Dalton?" she asks dryly with one of those almost-smirks that he knows means she's not actually irritated with him.

"Something like that." Ordinarily, he would rise to the bait and they'd go a couple rounds, but right now he's got a different priority. "Have you seen Mac? I've been looking for him everywhere, it was kind of a rough one. He was- he was _incredible,_ Matty, but I have no idea where he's gone off to and he was weird the whole way home."

Matty thinks about it for a moment then shakes her head, shrugging. "No, sorry. Try Research, he's usually down there when I can't track him down."

Well, duh. Of course. "Thanks," he calls over his shoulder, already halfway back down the hall by the time his manners catch up to him.

The trip down to Research and Development is the same length it's always been, but for some reason, it feels like it takes way longer. Probably just the nerves skittering up and down his spine, making every moment drag out twice as long as it normally would feel. Jack taps his foot impatiently as the elevator takes him down into the levels of the building below the ground, and he can almost feel the air cool by degrees as he goes. Finally, a soft ping alerts him that he's reached R&D, and he heads down the hallway to a room he's grown quite familiar with.

When he gets there and pokes his head in, two other heads swivel over to look at him, a conversation stopping dead in its tracks. Bonnie Whittacker and Peter Tam both stare at him expectantly, with the same irreverent boredom they always regard him with. Mac obviously being something of an outlier, Jack has always got the feeling that Whittacker and Tam don't hold much regard for field agents. Given the general attitude he's seen from some of them, Jack can't exactly say he blames them.

"Either of you two seen Mac today?" he asks, getting straight to the point. Tam looks at Whittacker who shrugs.

"Ran into him in the hall upstairs a bit ago," she tells him. As she continues, the boredom on her face turns into outright dislike, the reason becoming evident when she elaborates. "He was on the way to the range. The Director has him recertifying. Probably gonna be there a while." Bonnie Whittacker does not care for Director MacGyver, and is a little less subtle about it than most of DXS.

"Thanks," Jack says distractedly, thumping the doorframe with his fist and turning right back out of the room. He, Whittacker, and Tam have an understanding of sorts between them, warming their relationship from frosty to neutral, and it's not one that includes many pleasantries. They have exactly one thing in common, and that is Mac. While that's enough to prompt greetings in hallways, they're never going to be exactly friends.

Mac is, exactly as Whittacker had advised, in the range. This confirmation stirs the pit of unease in Jack's gut, and he hesitates a little before opening the door and walking in. It takes his eyes a moment to adjust from the bright hallway to the dimmer lighting in the small range, and as he waits, he snags a set of ear and eye protectors from the rack near the door. Settling the large headset over his ears and blinking through the well-kept plastic of the glasses, Jack takes stock of his surroundings.

The lanes themselves are well lit but the rest of the range is somewhat shadowed, a blueish hue to everything. Only one lane is currently in use, and he's grown very familiar with the blond hair scruffed into slight disarray by earmuffs, facing away from him in lane three. Mac is looking straight downrange, handgun held up in near-perfect form, firing repeatedly at a target Jack can't see from this vantage point.

It's something Jack just can't get used to, seeing Mac shoot. He's seen the kid draw his weapon on a mission so rarely that it always looks like absurd play-acting when it happens, and before today, there's never been a reason for him to actually fire. Simply put, Mac does not like guns. He barely looks like himself now, at least the part of him Jack can see, a sliver of a profile with a deadened expression, squeezing the trigger over and over.

Recertifying. The list of things Jack would like to have a word with James about gets longer every day.

After not two more minutes, Mac must reach the end of the set, because he discharges the now empty clip, makes sure there isn't anything left in the chamber, and sets the gun down on the ledge in front of him. He reaches up and presses the small yellow button next to him as he pulls his ear protectors down around his neck. The target makes a mechanic whirring sound as it slides up the range towards him, and without turning his head, Mac speaks over it.

"Did you need something, Jack?"

Jack doesn't bother to ask how Mac knew it was him, instead ambling over and leaning against the lane divider next to him. The target has reached the ledge by that point, and he glances over at it, appraising the grouping. It's good. It's not amazing, but it's decently skilled shooting. Mac isn't a bad shot, in fact he's quite a good one, but you wouldn't know it from the way the kid is frowning at the paper, at the featureless outline of the man printed on it, a dozen holes blown through its chest.

"Just lookin' for you," Jack says, turning away from the target and towards Mac himself. "Seems to me, you just went through this whole dog and pony show last week. I thought he only made you recertify once a month." The fact that nobody else that Jack has heard of is put through the same insulting ordeal goes unmentioned. He doesn't get the feeling it would be entirely helpful to point out.

Mac looks at him for a second, then away again. He holsters his gun and takes down the target, folding it up, all without saying a word. It feels like a very long time before he says anything in response, and Jack's chest feels tight.

"He says I can't be trusted to use my instincts," Mac says eventually, sounding exhausted and far, far older than twenty-four. There's no mention of who 'he' is and there doesn't need to be. They both know. "So he's making me recertify in the hopes that next time, I'll remember."

"That's such bullshit." Jack can't help it. He's not gonna let that one fly by unquestioned. No way, no how. "Everything you did today was pure instinct, and it was great work." When Mac snorts quietly and looks down, smiling faintly, Jack doubles down. "I'm serious. The bomb never got made, and everybody in that room walked out without a scratch. Do you know how amazing that was? You made a call and it was the right one. Nothing untrustworthy about that."

Still looking down, Mac nods, but doesn't respond verbally. Jack doesn't make him, content to stay leaning there with his arms folded, giving Mac the space to sort through whatever is going on his head. The gears are turning visibly, and what's coming next feels important. Eventually, the smile faded completely away, one hand hovering without thought over the hip where the gun now rests, Mac starts talking.

"I can still feel it."

"Feel what?" Jack asks. He keeps his voice quiet and gentle. This has been happening more often, moments where Mac will say something unprompted and honest, and the last thing Jack wants to do is spook him into stopping.

"The moment I fired. I can feel the trigger under my finger, the weight of it in my hand." That hand flexes, careful inventor's fingers splaying out and curling back in again, shaking just the slightest bit. "It's like I burned myself or something. I can't get it off." Another long moment of silence elapses between them and then, in a rather startling move, Mac actually looks Jack directly in the eye. His voice gets stronger, a fraction louder, as he says, "I hate it. I hate that thing. It feels like I'm carrying death around strapped to my leg, and I just… I hate it."

"So stop." It sounds so simple when Jack says it out loud, the suggestion he's been building to for some time now. There just hasn't been a good moment to bring it up, and he's been trying to put it together in his head first, a way to justify it.

"What?" Now Mac's hand has gone still, hanging loose and limp at his side. He looks almost amused.

"Stop carrying," Jack clarifies, and now that he's said it, he's sure it's the right decision. "Look, okay, I've been thinking about this. Honestly, there's no reason for you to be carrying if it's not a tool you're going to use. I'm not saying you should, just that if you're not going to, it's just going to get in your way and confuse things when you have to make a call. You can make a weapon out of just about anything, you just showed today that you can connect with people better than you can make the call to take them out, and I mean. You've got me."

There are not a lot of moments in which Jack gets to revel in the feeling of having stunned Mac speechless. This is one of them. Mac just stands there, mouth slightly open like he'd been about to say something but lost the words themselves, squinting at him. Jack shrugs, letting the concept just sink in for a while. After what had to have been a full forty-five empty seconds, Mac shakes his head once, rapidly.

"I can't just…" He shakes his head again, brow furrowed. "The Director would never okay that."

"We won't tell him."

"He'd make it into a _huge_ deal when he found out."

"We won't let him."

Jack is sure Mac is about to interrogate the hell out of that claim, completely dismiss offhand the idea that they could let or not let the Director do anything but, surprisingly, he doesn't. He closes his mouth and tilts his head to the side, studying Jack hard. Something in Jack's lungs feels light and effervescent. Carbonated, like champagne, as he waits for it.

"Okay," Mac finally says. He's got an odd look on his face, but it isn't a bad one. If Jack had to guess, he'd say there was a similar feeling happening on Mac's end. It's the dazzling, breathtaking question – _could we really get away with this?_ "Okay."

It doesn't feel as if it's actually been done until they're called out on their next mission and they're approaching the building together. As he pulls on the door to open it for the both of them, Mac pauses for a moment before going inside. Without a word, he lifts the side of his coat, to show Jack the place his holster used to be. The place it isn't any more.

Mac isn't carrying.

Jack grins at him and grabs his shoulder, spinning him around and pushing him into the building first, following it up with an affectionate ruffle of Mac's hair, earning a squawk of indignant protest. Progress feels _damn_ good.


	27. I've Been Less Than Half Myself

_once more airplanes for the win for getting me to write things. enjoy this chapter! it was one of my favorites to write but also one of the ones i'm most nervous about._

_this chapter's title is sourced from sleeping at last's song atlas: nine._

_chapter warning: fairly intense confrontation between james and mac._

* * *

It's thrilling in a way it would be impossible to explain to somebody not in his exact situation, walking into DXS for the first time without his gun. Tiny sparks of adrenaline fizzle up and down Mac's spine, and there's a lightness in his steps that makes the very ground underneath his shoes feel like it's made of new material. He wonders, in an odd turn of a mood, if this is how the people in the fairytales felt, when they had curses lifted off them. The gun had only weighed about a pound and a half, but the way he's walking now, it may as well have been a hundred.

Mac's hip is bare and his head is clear and Jack is grinning at him like he's done something worth being proud of, and it almost doesn't feel real. It almost feels like things are finally shifting in the kaleidoscope lens of his world, shapes knocking against one another until they make a picture that looks more right. One he might be able to, if he keeps twisting, make some sense of.

Until the moment he rounds the corner, still laughing a little at something Jack said, and there stands James. They weren't even supposed to be meeting with him today, just coming in to go over some things about their last reports with Matty. They're not even near the hall of Directors, planning to meet with Matty in a regular conference room, and yet here he is, down some random hallway in DXS. If Mac didn't know better, he'd wonder if James had been waiting for them.

"Angus," his father greets him, eyes flicking up from the tablet in his hands. He glances briefly to the side and says, sounding even less interested, "Dalton." After giving cursory acknowledgement to Jacks presence, his attention comes back to Mac, and for a long moment he's silent, just looking at Mac with that same appraising look he's worn for years.

Mac starts doing the calculations automatically, cataloguing what he's said and done and failed to do in the last few days, looking for something James could be mad about. Disappointed in. Irritated by. He can't come up with anything, except for failing to use his gun when Reed was holding the lab hostage, but they've already… been over that. James already made his stance on the matter perfectly clear, and while he's never shown himself to be above bringing up past mistakes, he generally doesn't seek Mac out specifically to talk about something they've just been over.

Realizing what he's doing, Mac swallows hard and tries to shut the thought process down. He's got no reason to be behaving like this, not when he doesn't even _know_ that James is unhappy with him - he can hear it now, an argument they'd had a hundred times when he was a teenager, and James didn't appreciate the way Mac reacted to everything he said like he was being chastised. _I haven't even said anything but your name and you're already acting like I'm yelling at you,_ James had snapped, time and again. _Makes me feel like I've done something wrong when all I want is my son's attention._

"You're early for your meeting with Webber," James says, eventually. "That's good. Try not to waste her time, she's a busy woman."

"Yes, sir, I know." Mac tries not to sound like a sullen teenager when he says it, and James narrows his eyes. "We're on our way."

"Better get going, then." Stepping to the side, James gestures out towards the hallway. "Don't want to keep her waiting."

Grateful to get away from that stare, and generally not finding his father especially pleasant to talk to, Mac is happy to follow the direction and continue on toward the conference room they were going to meet Matty in. Jack hasn't said a word throughout their brief interaction with James, and still doesn't as they pass him. Mac is grateful for that - there's enough tension between them, he doesn't want anything to happen that would risk escalating it further.

Just as he's about to pass James' sightline, his voice calls back down the hall, stopping Mac in his tracks.

"Angus, stop."

Ignoring the little pricks of fear that immediately spike into the back of his neck, Mac does as he's told. He feels it rather than sees it when Jack stops too, taking one last step until he's so close behind Mac's shoulder they're almost touching. It calms his nerves somewhat, and Mac tries to focus on that as he looks James in the eye and says, "What is it?"

"Your gun. Where is it? Your jacket rode up, you're not wearing it."

The air in the hall has grown heavy and suffocating, Mac's heart beating so loudly in his throat he's afraid James will be able to see it, throbbing against his skin. All of his giddiness, all of the lightness he'd felt, is gone, replaced by the crushing sense that he's made a huge mistake, deluded himself by thinking deliberately defying that rule James has been so insistent on for so long. What had he been thinking? _What was I thinking, what was I thinking, what-_

The smallest brush, a split-second touch against his back, disguisable as a shift in stance, reminds Mac that he isn't standing in this hallway alone. Jack is standing right there behind him, as solid as he'd sounded down in the range when he'd told Mac to stop carrying in the first place. He remembers how easy it had sounded, when Jack told him to just stop, remembers Jack's hands on his shoulders just a few minutes ago at the front of the building, fingers affectionately ruffling through his hair.

_We won't let him,_ Jack had said, in the range, and Mac thinks it again now, repeating it like a mantra to himself as he straightens up his posture. _I won't let him._

"It's down at the range," he says, and the lie burns in his mouth. He swallows down the immediate urge to take it back and tell James the truth and pushes on, giving just enough detail to satisfy suspicion but not enough to pique more of it. "It wasn't firing right, I asked one of the techs to take a look at it."

For a moment longer, James just looks at him, his expression hard to read from fifteen or so feet away. Then, he nods, and turns back to what he was doing, without bothering to verbally dismiss them but clearly finished with the conversation. It takes everything Mac has not to collapse back into Jack, to instead turn around and step away from him, continue on their way down the hall.

Jack doesn't bring it up, the question about the gun or the lie Mac had answered it with, not until after their meeting with Matty. They're in Jack's car, on the way to drop Mac off at his and Bozer's house, when he mentions the interaction.

"That was quick thinking back there," Jack tells him, voice deceptively casual. His eyes stay focused on the road, hands in their easy grip on the steering wheel. You'd think he was talking about the weather or the newest _Star Wars_ movie, the seamless way he'd brought it up, but for Mac, there's no mistaking what he's talking about, though he doesn't identify it directly. "He's gonna ask again, though. Do you know what you're gonna say to him when he does?"

Actually, Mac has been thinking about this. For the better part of the day, it's the only thing he's been able to focus on – what the hell he's going to do when the inevitable happens, and James does ask again. He's embarrassed to admit, even in the privacy of his own thoughts, that he'd only been half paying attention to their meeting with Matty, which could've been an issue if it had been about anything more serious than going over a few questions she had about their after-actions. Instead, he'd been thinking about James, and the gun, and the brick wall they were barreling towards.

When James asked, he'd lied. It had sounded good, too – it wasn't the first time he'd left the weapon down there while not on active assignment, getting something about the mechanics repaired or adjusted. But it's a temporary patch, and that lie, while it had saved his ass in the moment, will do him in if he continues it. It's going to spiral, getting bigger and becoming a delicately balanced house of cards, unless he confronts it head on. Unless some kind of truth comes out. Which is how he's come to the conclusion, thinking through it and metaphorically watching as until there's only one left, that there's only truly a single way forward.

Jack is still talking when he zones back in, some suggestion that Mac doesn't even half think about before he interrupts.

"I'm going to threaten to quit."

A beat of stunned, empty silence. Jack is staring at him from the driver's seat, eyes wide, and it's only the irritated blare of a car horn behind them that prompts his attention back to the road, the car lurching indelicately back into motion.

"You're going to _what?"_ he asks, obviously shocked.

"When he asks me about the gun again," Mac says, doing his best to sound more sure than he feels about it all, "and I tell him I won't wear it, and he starts on me about it, I'm going to threaten to quit. I'm going to tell him that if he tries to force me to carry it, I'll walk."

"Damn." The word is quiet and impressed, though undercut somewhat by what follows it. "Are you sure? Like, you're _sure_ you're gonna be able to do that?"

"Yes I'm sure," snaps Mac in return. He's a little mad at the question, at the hesitance in Jack's voice. Like Jack doesn't seem to think he has the spine to do it, that he's actually so weak and obedient that he's completely incapable of telling James no, even when there truly is no other option. The thought pushes him forward into something else, the need to make it very clear to Jack exactly who has to protect who here. "Listen, you can't- You can't say a _word_ to him about it."

"Mac," Jack hedges, obviously uncomfortable with the direction this is going, "there's no way I can just stand there and listen to it if he starts in on-"

"You're going to have to." If it weren't for how seriously he needs to make Jack understand this, Mac would feel bad for interrupting him again. "He will _fire_ you. He won't fire me. He may get mad, he may rage, he may stand there and shout at me for a full sixty-minute hour, but he can't force me to do this. Like you said, I'm not going to let him. So either he's going to drop it, or he'll have to let me quit, and there's no way he's going to let me quit."

It's impossible to tell what Jack is thinking. His mouth is twisted down into an uncomfortable grimace, forehead creased in a frown, but he doesn't say anything in response, not right away. He thinks hard, through two more intersections, before he nods shortly, and says, "Okay."

The entire thing has Mac feeling a little nauseated, sick to his stomach, throat tight and cheeks hot. The easiest thing, obviously, would be to give in before the fight even happens, to put the gun back on and take his marching orders like the good soldier he's been playing as long as he can remember. But he can't. Not now that he's had a taste of what it's like to not have to haul that thing around with him all the time, not now that Jack has put the idea in his head.

It isn't just the gun, either. It's every time Jack has frowned and snorted in disapproval at some order James gave them, made some side comment to Mac later about the way James spoke to him. It's the idea that, for the first time since his doomed first partnership, there was someone standing opposite James saying listen, there's another way. It doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different, and I can help.

They don't talk any more for the rest of the ride. Only the sound of Jack's favored classic rock station breaks the still air of the inside of the car, quieted to nothing when they pull up outside the house. Mac goes to get out of the car, and he's about to shut the door behind him when a voice stops him.

"Hey, Mac."

He freezes, just for a moment gripped by the echo of the same fear he'd felt in the hall with James when he'd thought he was in the clear, only to be stopped by his snapped name. It fades immediately, though, when Mac turns back and sees how Jack is looking at him, leaning a little towards the open passenger's side door. His expression is kind and there's a very small smile on his face, genuine enough to crinkle the corners of his eyes.

"I'm proud of you."

Something raw and soft in Mac's chest gives a small, wounded cry, and he swallows hard around a sudden lump of broken glass. It almost takes him to his knees right there on the sidewalk, hand going white-knuckled around the car's doorframe. _Stop it,_ he wants to tell Jack, shout at him, _You can't keep_ doing _this to me,_ wants to break down on the grass, wants to bury his face in his hands and sob so hard something deep and cracked and ugly in him shreds its way through his chest and makes it out into the open.

He doesn't do any of that. Mac doesn't manage to speak at all, but the look on Jack's face, so understanding it almost makes him angry, says he isn't expected to. So he nods once, short and sharp, and closes the door. As he turns and walks inside, thinking about what he's going to say to James, the risk he's taking, it still throbs there in his chest, hot and aching and terrifying all at once. _I'm proud of you._

When it happens, Mac is ready.

They're about to leave, to get on the plane, when James asks him about the gun. It's impossible to tell if he'd specifically been watching for it, or if he'd just happened to notice it isn't there, but either way, it doesn't matter. It's time to face the music, and Mac has been rehearsing his solo for a week.

James sends Jack out of the room almost immediately, when Mac lifts his chin and gives him a stone-faced look at the question. Mac is grateful, because he's sure this is about to turn ugly, and if Jack tries to step in, he's going to be out the door before he can finish a sentence. If James gets even the _hint_ of an idea that this was Jack's idea, it's game over, and every time Mac thinks about walking back in here without his partner behind him, it's scarier than the last.

"We've talked about this a _dozen_ times, Angus, I don't have time to play these games with you right now." The Director's voice is steel, threatening a sharpened edge if he has to push any harder than this. "Go and get your gun."

"No."

"I'm going to tell you one more time," James says, his voice rising a notch, taking a step closer. Mac has to fight the urge to step back in turn, to hold his ground. "You are going to _go_ and _get_ your gun, _right now."_

"No, I won't. I've decided I won't be carrying any more."

The words hang heavy and final in the air, out now and unable to be taken back. James is, for once in his life, struck completely wordless by what Mac said. His eyes are furious and uncomprehending, his hands in fists at his sides. Mac blinks and sees two decades of a clenched jaw and balled fists, hears the echo of slammed doors and cupboards, of James taking quick steps towards him with narrowed, angry eyes. He sees all of this and for once, he doesn't back down.

For once, Mac looks James in the face, and stands his ground.

He has to. He knows, with an abrupt, cold clarity, that this is it. This is the moment he has to make a choice. If Mac gives in now, if he lowers his eyes and backs down, that's the end. He'll lose a piece of himself he'll never get back, he'll never be anything other than what James wants from him, the person James expected him to be. Mac has spent twenty years trying to force himself to be that person, and it's an odd thought that's crossed his mind lately, in the days since their conversation in that car.

_I'm proud of you,_ Jack had said. He's been dreaming about it, in the hazy moments right before he wakes up in the morning, that split-second moment over the passenger seat of his car. Mac realizes, with a strange kind of calm as if this has been a long time in the making, that he cares more about being the kind of man Jack would be proud of than he cares about being the kind of man James would be.

"DXS needs me," he says, and it's amazing, how the words carry only the barest hint of a tremble. "You need me. If you force me to carry that gun, I'm going to walk out the front door, and I'll walk up to the first agency that'll take me, and you _know_ I wouldn't have a minute's trouble finding one, not with our reputation. How is that going to look for you, dad? What are people going to think if your best agent, if _your son_ jumps ship, this soon after you had your entire agency ripped to shreds by an infiltration? How embarrassed are you willing to be over whether or not I carry a gun? And who, _who_ can you possibly trust to help you find Walsh?"

The air between them sits balanced on a razor's edge, ready to tip one way or another at the slightest breath. Mac wonders, a touch hysterically, if this might be the moment James finally snaps and actually hits him. It's been twenty-four years coming, he's been expecting it as long as he can remember. It wouldn't be a surprise at all if this is what finally does it. He can't stop watching his father's hands, out of the corner of his eye, waiting for it to happen.

It doesn't happen. James is the first to look away. He takes a step back with his face twisted in a dangerous glare, hands still in irate fists, and says, "Fine. Have it your way. Don't come crying to me when your attitude gets you shot again. Get the hell out of here before I change my mind."

Mac is willing to let him have it, to act like he's the one who somehow made this decision, if it means this conversation is over. He's got what he wanted, he doesn't need the last word, too. James, however, has no such reservations. As Mac is walking past him, he's suddenly yanked back, a hand snatching the shoulder of his jacket and pulling him roughly to a stop. He's unable to rein in the hard flinch, eyes closing for a moment as he braces himself.

James only speaks, snapping merely inches from his ear, "This had better be a one time thing, Angus. If you try and pull some ridiculous, insubordinate stunt like this again, you're going to be out of here _so fast_ you won't know what happened. If I can't trust you to follow orders meant to keep you safe, what the hell can I trust you with?" He releases Mac's jacket and walks away, past him to exit the room first.

Mac takes a moment to collect his composure, then follows. Jack, who was anxiously pacing in the hall, walks quickly up to him, and it's all Mac can do not to flinch again.

"Well?" Jack asks, glancing down the hall towards where James's retreating back is still visible. "How'd it go?"

"It's over." Mac feels numb with relief, a shudder going down his spine as he says it. "I did it. I won, he's not going to make me carry."

There's something tempered and held back in the excited relief Jack displays, moving more slowly than Mac gets the feeling he wants to when he reaches out, grips Mac's shoulder, shaking him a little in excitement.

"Oh _hell_ yes, way to go, kid. I knew you could do it." A bright, elated grin stretches across Jack's face, the exact opposite of the way James had just looked at him, and Mac fights down the childish impulse to take that last step forward and tuck himself under that outstretched arm, hide his face in the collar of Jack's jacket. He can almost feel the phantom of the leather under his hands, sturdy and safe.

But he can't do that, can't let himself go another step farther in giving Jack the opportunity to realize exactly how much Mac is starting to rely on him. It's one thing to know it inside his own head, to relive the what-if of losing him night after night, dreaming of that day in the snow but with a whole host of new endings, it's another entirely to let Jack know about any of it. So instead, Mac back, out of Jack's reach and towards the door. They still have a mission to complete, after all.

It's a short one this time, made to feel shorter still without the weapon weighing him down with every step he takes. It's so quick, in and out, that Riley isn't brought along, instead staying back to assist IT with a massive network of offshore accounts another field team uncovered earlier that week. They got home two days ago, and now it's approaching sunset on a Saturday in the front yard of the house. There's moderate wind today and light cloud cover brought with it, and there's a chill not usually present this time of year. It makes the air smell fresh and new, stinging a little when Mac breathes too deeply.

A dull _thwack_ accompanies an impact on his shoulder, and Mac whirls around to see Bozer, grinning and dancing back away from him. The foam weapon in his hands is still raised, and he arches his eyebrows, a wordless question of _well? What are you gonna do about it?_

What Mac is gonna do about it is to raise his own weapon and swing back in retaliation, only to be caught by another swipe from the side, this time coming from Riley. The imitation sword she holds, a battered thing of bright neon green, is nowhere near hard enough to do any real damage, but he staggers dramatically back anyway, howling in a comic imitation of a pained cry.

Riley about doubles over, laughing and breathless, hand not holding her green monstrosity braced against her knee. It started getting cold out when the wind picked up, and so she's wearing one of Mac's CalTech hoodies. The grey and orange item of clothing is too big on her, baggy over her shoulders and sleeves pushed up past her wrists, and something about seeing her in it makes Mac feel warm and happy.

(It's a good thing, too, because the moment she'd put it on, Riley had looked Mac in the face and gravely informed him he would absolutely not be getting it back.)

"Point to Riley for a perfect sneak-attack," Jack calls out from where he sits in a lawn chair in the driveway, half-finished beer stuck in the mesh cup holder. His phone is stored away and he doesn't have a notepad, so if he's keeping track of these points, Mac has no idea how.

Bozer had been helping a friend who was ramping up for a production of Cyrano, spending about two or three nights a week assistant stage-managing for her. They'd just moved, he'd informed Mac, from running their fight choreography with foam boffer swords to actual dull-edged steel, and then unzipped a duffel bag, showing several brightly colored foam weapons stored inside. The boffers were borrowed on a whim, Bozer wildly excited by the idea of getting to try them out for himself, and now here they are, he, Mac, and Riley chasing each other around the lawn in a free for all, with Jack appointing himself the referee and awarding arbitrary points for whatever he decides they should get them for.

"Point to Bozer, too," the man calls over a moment after awarding one to Riley, causing her to stand up and spin towards him, pointing her boffer sword at him accusingly.

"Excuse me," Riley calls, though she's still smiling widely, "Bozer did not sneak attack _anybody_ there, Mac just wasn't paying attention."

"Yeah, but he executed a pretty sweet distraction for you. Another point to Bozer because I said so."

"Jack!"

"Do you want to make it three? I can do this all day."

While they're arguing about points, Mac takes the opportunity to go for Bozer, swinging the boffer, only for Bozer to dodge out of the way just in time, landing another shot over Mac's back.

"A point to Mac."

Now it's Bozer's turn, indignant voice demanding, "Why does _Mac_ get a point, I'm the one who tagged him!"

"Mac gets a point for being the only one who hasn't argued with me about points."

When Mac looks over at him, Jack gives an exaggerated wink, then goes wide-eyed and points to his left. The warning comes just in time to dodge away from Bozer's hot pink sword, which skims the edge of his hoodie. Abandoning that course of action, Bozer drops the boffer and, weaponless, tackles Mac, knocking them both into the grass.

"Point for Bozer."

"He didn't even use the- hey!" Riley yelps as Mac catches her across the shins with his yellow boffer. She leans down to snatch it away from him, apparently figuring they were all throwing the rules to the wind at this point, and when she does, he reaches up to grab her wrist and pull her down with them.

Riley lands half on his chest with an indignant, wordless shout, knocking the wind out of him and then remaining there. All three of them lay in the grass together, the ground cold and hard under Mac's back, Riley sprawled half across him and Bozer trapping his opposite arm under his own body. He could get them off easily, probably nab all three boffers and be the supreme winner of the entire haphazard 'fight', but he finds he'd rather stay there, in that disheveled, undignified pile, not caring that anyone could drive by and see.

The clouds are finally clearing up, and it's late enough that a few stars are beginning to dot the sky, far enough from the city that they can shine through the haze of traffic and bright downtown lights. Mac breathes deeply, Riley's elbow jabbing him in the ribs, his arm going numb under Bozer's back, and looks up. He can hear Jack laughing at them from the driveway, the shutter click of what he thinks is his partner's phone camera, and despite the wind making his nose and lips numb, he feels warm in a way he can't describe.

It's the happiest he's been in a long, long time. Maybe it's the happiest he's ever been. For just that moment, he's not Agent MacGyver, he's not his father's prized operative, he's not even a genius at getting out of tight situations. He's just Mac. He's just twenty-four, and happy, and laid out in the grass, lightheaded and dizzy with normal. It feels good. It feels right.


	28. Fault Lines

_[rises like that little cartoon dragon in mulan] I'M ALIVE! now i could go on about school and work and life and how i'm studying for the biggest test of my life but something tells me y'all are way more interested in the chapter than in my excuses for why i fell off the face of the earth for half a month._

_so! onward! also i know nothing about amsterdam! sorry to the netherlands!_

* * *

Despite what she'd been warned when they'd been talking about it in her field training, Riley had always thought surveillance sounded kind of cool. And it is. She's excited to finally get to try it for herself, and can't see at all what Jack had been talking about when he said it was boring as dirt. It feels kind of thrilling, even after everything else she's done on this job. Riley still can't hardly believe she's not in prison, and beyond that, that she's here. On _stakeout._ She can't understand what Jack can find boring about this.

Then thirty-two hours pass, and Riley finds herself revising her opinion. It's her turn to keep watch again, the three of them rotating in shifts, a couple of hours spent in the hot seat before they're relieved by the next person up. Large, noise-cancelling headphones sit over her ears, blocking out the rest of what's going on in the apartment they're holed up in, receiving dish pointed at their target apartment across the street to pick up conversations taking place inside. They got lucky in that the window they're focused on has no curtains - a dumb move for criminals, if you ask Riley - but it's not a direct look into the room from their angle either. It's a lot of focus, and very little else.

So far, nothing has happened. People have come and go through the apartment, had the kind of menial conversations that apparently even international criminals known for harboring fugitives need to have, about groceries and the guy coming to fix the heating. They're here to document their fugitive, suspected of aiding and abetting a war criminal, entering the apartment and interacting with the occupants, indicating they plan to harbor her. They do that, they get their fugitive and the people who are assisting her and countless others who come through the Netherlands on their flight away from whatever jurisdiction it is they're wanted in.

Too bad they don't have a precise date on when, exactly, that's going to be. It reminds Riley of Minnesota, of their several day window surrounding the date of the bio-weapon's transit across the border and the waiting game they'd played until it happened. At least that time, she'd had somebody to talk to while they wait. This time, at least while on duty at the window, thanks to the headphones and how quiet their sound is, there's no real way to hold any kind of conversation.

At least they'd gotten the equipment at all. It had taken Matty catching them on the way out of the building to realize they weren't set up with everything they needed for the op. Matty had realized they were missing a form from the equipment department, something that Director MacGyver, as he put himself in charge of their op, should have filed days ago. She'd drawn one up herself and fast-tracked what they needed into duffel bags loaded onto the plane, alerting them to the near miss when she caught up to them. It made Riley's skin crawl, and she'd seen the look exchanged between Matty and Jack before they parted ways.

Adjusting her grip on the sound dish, Riley gives what she hopes is a muted sigh - she can't tell through the headphones. This assignment is starting to drag so bad she's begun to take notes in a spiral-bound she's pulled out of her computer bag, jotting down what she's seeing. She counts the hair colors of the pedestrians on the sidewalk - mostly blond and light brown, the number of kids coming in and out of the ice cream shop at the end of the street - dozens. How many of the kids drop their ice cream - three. Riley notes a flashy woman with an outfit in a truly atrocious combination of green and orange clashing horribly with her red hair, and a man that gives her an odd, bad feeling, tall and thin, black hair and wearing a dark coat.

Her focus, of course, is primarily on their target apartment, but there's only so much to pay attention to when of the usual occupants, one is out and one is probably taking a nap. In between jotting down notes about the human element of Amsterdam flowing past her down on the street, Riley watches the apartment, the curtainless window and the empty room inside. As the minutes drag on and the end of her shift keeping watch approaches, her focus drifts more and more down to the street, but not because of her bored little game with the notebook.

It's the man. The one she'd seen right after the red headed woman with the bad sense of color combination, the one that sent a cold prickle down her spine. Tall and thin. Black hair. Dark coat. She sees him that first time, and then again maybe ten minutes later, on the opposite street corner. If it had just been twice, maybe she'd have let it go. Maybe she would've forgotten all about him. But then the curtain at the window of the apartment just next to their target apartment twitches, too fast for Riley to make out the face that appears for just a moment, and not even two minutes later, she sees him again.

This time, he looks up at her. He's too far away to make out details of his face, and he turns away too quickly, but now Riley's bad feeling has grown into something impossible to ignore. Her shift is up, and she pulls one side of the headphones off her ear. Sound slams back into her left ear and she says, loudly enough to catch the attention of Mac and Jack where they sit on the cramped living room's couch, "Have either of you ever seen _Rear Window?"_

They look at her with twin expressions of mystification, and if things had been different, Riley might have found it funny.

"The Hitchcock movie?" Mac asks. "With the guy spying on his neighbors?"

"Yeah," she says, nodding and glancing back. She half expects to see the man standing in their target apartment's window, but he isn't there. He's not on the street either.

"Didn't one of the neighbors like, kill a guy or something?" Jack's voice is dubious, drawl thickened, slowing and cluttering his words. One eyebrow is raised, and he seems to find the reference almost funny. "Do I even _want_ to know why you're bringing that up right now?"

"Because I'm seeing things out this window that I can't put together and it's freaking me out. Either I'm going nuts, or there's somebody watching us," Riley tells him, turning back to the window, eyes sweeping the street for the man. "I've seen the same weird dude at least three times, and the curtain on the apartment next to our target has moved a couple times. The most recent time, he showed up on the street right after. I swear he looked right up at me."

Now, Jack doesn't look at all amused or confused, he's frowning in deep apprehension. He gets up off the couch and walks over, crouches next to where she's sitting, squinting down at the street.

"What did this man look like?" he asks, as Mac walks up and joins them, all three of them peering out the same pane of glass.

"White guy. Tall, thin, black hair, black coat. I wish I could tell you more, but I only saw him a couple times, and he was too far away to really get a good look. I don't know, guys, I just got a really, _really_ bad feeling when I saw him."

"Alright, well," Jack says, voice taking on that tone she's still not used to hearing out of him, authoritative and serious. Completely calm and in charge. "Looks like he's gone now, but I'll keep an eye out, for the guy and on that unit you mentioned, which one was it? Right?"

"To the left," corrects Riley, and Jack nods.

"Alright, to the left. It's my shift now anyway, why don't you go ahead and hand it over, I got it from here."

Jack takes over on watch and Riley goes back to the couch with Mac. He's got a deck of cars that he's pulled out from somewhere, shuffling and bridging intricately over and over in deft fingers. It's fascinating to watch him do things like this, casually and without much thought, small acts of incredible skill like he's been practicing all his life. The cards twist over his fingers, soft rustling sounds filling the air as they slide past one another. Riley shakes her head and looks away, only to be met by the silent back of Jack's head.

"You gonna deal those cards out, or just keep shuffling?" she asks, and he glances at her, surprised.

"Oh, you want to- sure. Yeah."

The game they end up playing is one Bozer's dad taught Mac, on some camping trip he'd gone on with his roommate's family when they were maybe twelve years old. He tells the story with a faint, fond smile of nostalgia on his face, talking about Robert Bozer and a week where he hadn't had to worry about anything besides catching frogs and burning marshmallows on a fire. In thinking about all the stories she's heard about his childhood - though there haven't really been all that many - Riley can't think of a single happy one that hadn't involved Bozer or his family in some capacity.

"You guys have known each other a really long time, huh," she comments, picking up the two new cards he's dealt for her. There's a small pang of jealousy under the words - Riley has no idea what that's like, to have a friend who's known you that long. Someone not related to you who's grown up with you, seen you at your best and worst and most average moments. The thought of that relationship quickly turns to something else, and Riley winces. "Lying to him about all this, that's gotta be tough."

One of Mac's shoulder goes up and down, a slow, half-hearted shrug. His eyes are trained down at the cards in his hand, and he studies them for a long moment, then rearranges two of them into a different spot. When he answers her, he says it so casually that it takes Riley several seconds to process what he's said. The tone doesn't match the words at all.

"It is tough, but I don't have another choice. The day I tell him what I really do is the day I put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. Metaphorically, y'know."

Unable to help herself, Riley stares openly. It's obvious to her right away that those words, shocking and nausea inducing, aren't Mac's. Those are someone else's words coming out of his mouth. He notices when he glances up from his cards, and his face morphs into a cringe.

"Sorry, it's uh- It's something my dad said, in the beginning, just trying to get me to understand what kind of danger I'd put him in if I ever told him about all this."

"That's…" Riley's lost her focus on their card game entirely now, her hand set face-down on the table while she looks directly at Mac. "That's really messed up, that he'd say something like that to you about Bozer. You don't need that image in your head."

Another shrug, the same shoulder as the first one, a slow rise and fall. Riley takes a chance and rather than letting it drop, she pushes.

"There's a lot of stuff he does that's really messed up, actually, Mac," she says, trying to keep her voice light and calm. There's a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes fix back on his cards. "The way he talks to you, treats you, it's…" _It's abusive,_ she wants to say, but she knows if that word leaves her mouth that's the end of anything she could hope to accomplish with this conversation. And besides, it's not just about Mac and James's personal relationship, abusive though she sincerely does think it is, despite not knowing the exact nature and extent of the mistreatment. "There's stuff on missions, too."

Now he looks up, cards going down to join hers on the table. There's a suspicious look on Mac's face, a frown creasing his forehead.

"You know we had to stop on the way out for our equipment, on this one," she says, and he nods shortly. "This would've all been a lot harder and a lot more risky if Matty hadn't caught that we didn't have any requisitioned. She never should've had to. Way I see it, I think he just counted on you figuring something out."

With his jaw set, mouth pressed in a stiff line, Mac is uncomfortably quiet. His eyes dart, once, over to Jack, sitting not thirty feet away from them at the window.

"Look at your past missions, the way he's been running things. He expects you to just figure it out a lot," Riley says, taking it a step farther. "It's not right. And one day it's gonna-"

Abruptly, Mac gets to his feet. He walks away from the table, their game forgotten completely, and Riley falls silent. She watches his back and feels her fear and empathy for him like a physical pain in her chest. Riley knows what it's like to walk away from things too heavy to carry in your current state. What she doesn't know is if he's going be ready when the day comes that they don't have a choice, and one way or another, it's dropped on him.

When Mac's turn for a watch shift arrives, and he slips the industrial grade headphones over his ears, Riley feels guiltily relieved. Since she'd pushed the conversation about James enough that Mac had physically gotten up and walked away from it, she's had a lot of time to sit on the couch in their borrowed apartment and think about what went wrong there. Aside from the obvious - this was probably not the time or place but hey, you don't get to be choosy when opportunity aligns itself - there's another thing that she can't escape, nagging at the back of her mind. He's been shooting her weird looks, suspicious glances, and in the time in between them, he's got an expression on his face like he's doing math.

It's become glaringly obvious to Riley that she's likely just tipped their hand, and she can't entirely say it was an accident. Though she understands why they'd needed to keep Mac in the dark about their investigation, she's got her doubts about it going on this long. He deserves to know, and at this point, she thinks they have enough evidence that there's no possible explanation for what's been going on except that James is - somehow, for some reason, that much they don't know - incurably corrupt. And if they're to get at that how, at that why, they're going to need Mac. He is, after all, right at the epicenter of all of it.

So yeah. It's a relief to get his focus off her, and onto the apartment across the street, if only for the next couple hours. Riley watches the back of his blond head, the movement of his hands at the windowsill as he twists open a paperclip, pulling the small strip of metal out into a straight line ready to be molded into something else. Jack had handed him a box of the things, no words exchanged between them about it, just a bewildered but grateful look from Mac and an easy smile from Jack. Riley found the whole business far more endearing than she enjoys admitting to, and is now focused back on the cards Mac left behind.

Jack comes over and sits down next to her, nudging her with an elbow.

"What's the face for?"

She doesn't even bother trying to pretend nothing is going on, telling him point blank, "I did something I probably shouldn't have."

"Whatever it is, we can figure it out. I'm sure it's not as bad as you think, you're way too hard on yourself, both you kids are. It's never as bad as you think, I promise." There isn't a moment's hesitation when he says it. Jack sounds completely sure of himself, and of her, and it makes that spot of fondness that's been growing deeper and deeper ache sharply.

"No, listen," Riley says, though it would be tempting to take the out, to make something up about her training or something, avoid telling him what she's maybe accidentally-on-purpose just done. "Mac knows something is up. We were talking, and he brought up some absolute garbage the Director said to him, and I said some things about the Director's conduct, and past missions, and I think he's onto us. It's gonna be a matter of time, weeks if we're lucky, before he's completely figured it out." She doesn't say she's sorry. She can't quite bring herself to, mostly because, truthfully, she isn't.

And Jack… Isn't mad about it. His expression of determined resolve doesn't shift instantly to one of disapproving thunder, doesn't say her name in that disapproving drawl she remembers from when she was a kid and did something blatantly dangerous or against the rules.

"We need to tell him soon anyway," is what he says, rather than 'you shouldn't have done that,' rather than 'what were you thinking.' Before Riley can ask for a reason to this unexpected response, Jack provides one. "Matty's about to take the investigation to Oversight."

"Holy shit," she says reflexively, unable to keep the shock out of her voice. "Is she really?"

Nodding, Jack glances over his shoulder at Mac, the headphones sealed over his ears keeping him from overhearing the conversation. "She caught me on the way out when she was telling us about the equipment req forms. All that's left to do is find some kind of motive and she's taking the whole thing to them, at least to alert them to her investigation. She thinks we've got enough proof, and wanted me to ask you to help compile a dossier for them, so it's laid out chronologically all in one place. Anyway, I feel like whatever his motivation is, we're not gonna be able to find it without Mac. There's a piece missing, and he's the one who's got it."

The cards in Riley's hands make a soft whispering noise as she shuffles them. She can't imitate any of the fancy tricks Mac had been doing earlier but something about moving them around in her hands is marginally comforting, at the very least giving her something to focus on aside from the reality of the new stage they've moved into. It's an odd kind of limbo, an in-between place she doesn't like. Riley has never done well with things being neither here nor there, neither one thing or another.

When she'd been maybe eight or nine, she'd heard the story of Schrodinger's cat, and then proceeded to have nightmares about it for a week. Something should be either dead or alive and the idea that it could somehow be both at once was more than she could handle. Not much has changed since then.

There is one source of solace she can take from the whole thing. Soon, the lying will be over. Mac will know what they've been doing, and she can stop going behind the back of someone whose heart has made itself a home as a brother next to hers. Though even that contains a more frightening prospect behind it, one she sees too in the shadows of Jack's face.

What will Mac think of them when he finds out? Will this be the end of the tentative, shaky, maybe-family they're building with him, will the end result leave him betrayed and alone? At the moment, she has no answers. All Riley has are what-ifs and fears. Schrodinger's bomb. As long as the fuse is burning, hasn't reached the ignition point, it both has and hasn't destroyed them all.

Over the course of a day and a half of surveillance, they gain everything they need in terms of their war criminal accomplice making her debut and incriminating herself and everyone in the room, and nobody again sees the strange man Riley had noticed earlier. She can't help but watch for him as she sits for her shifts at the window, eyes darting every so often down to the street, scanning the faces in the crowd , the window in the next apartment over. By the time they take their leave of their hideout, Riley is half convinced she'd imagined him. A prickling feeling lingers on the back of her neck, even as she drives away, on the major road leaving the heart of the city.

Thanks to Jack having taking the bulk of the overnight shifts the night before and Mac having lost their game of rock-paper-scissors, Riley is behind the wheel as they leave Amsterdam. The slow trickle of cars has grown into a river as the bike-dominated city falls away behind them and they move out towards the rest of the country, and as such, it would've been easy for her not to notice it. In fact, the only reason she does notice it is likely the paranoia sparked by the man in the dark coat, still lingering in tense knots in her shoulders.

"Guys," she says evenly, when it finally becomes unmistakable, what's going on. "We're being followed."

"What?" Jack asks, at the same time Mac chimes in with, "Are you sure?"

"There's a blue sedan three cars back and to the left, I can't quite get a look at the guy driving, but I think it's following us and I think it's the man I saw in the window, the one I told you about. I think we're being tailed." It takes all of Riley's nerve not to give in to the temptation of talking herself out of it, dismissing the concern and logicking herself in circles until even she doesn't think it's true. But it is true, and she is sure. Just to prove a point, to herself and to her team, she abruptly changes lanes, takes an unplanned turn down the wrong fork in the road.

The blue car follows them. She catches a sideways glimpse of the person driving, the black hair and the high-collared jacket she'd seen over and over down on the sidewalk.

"It's definitely him."

Hands flexing around the steering wheel, Riley speeds up just a fraction. Jack, next to her in the passenger's seat, makes eye contact with Mac in the rearview mirror, and then puts a hand on her shoulder, squeezing firmly.

"Do you have this?"

Gritting her teeth, Riley doesn't even allow herself to contemplate the question. "Yes. I have this. Now shut up so I can drive."

Jack shuts up, and Riley drives. Her eyesight has gone sharp and there's a rushing sound in her ears as she guides the car around, taking a possibly illegal u-turn through a gap in the median to the other side of traffic. Her body feels cold, her knuckles stinging at how tight she grips the steering wheel, and because Riley absolutely cannot panic right now, Riley does not panic. She keeps control of the car and of her composure, telling herself this is no different than trying to shake Mac in downtown Los Angeles over a bet of a bubble tea tab. She's been trained for this, they've made sure of it.

By the time they make it out of the city entirely, they've lost the tail, changed cars, and Riley feels simultaneously like she's high on endorphins and has lost ten years off her lifespan. Her heart is beating so loud in her chest she wonders if Mac and Jack can hear it. She wonders if they can tell how scared she is, a fear that hasn't set in until right now, when she's ceded control of their new vehicle for Jack and is sitting in the back seat with Mac.

Their hands sit on the seat between them, fingers laced together so tightly she can feel her joints ache. It's the pulse of Mac's wrist, under the press of her fingers, that finally allows Riley to calm down. All the way to exfil, she counts it, focuses until her world shrinks down into the steady, strong thump of Mac's life under her touch.

_Thud. Thud. _Everything is okay. _Thud. Thud. _She got them out. _Thud. Thud. _Jack looked at her like she'd hung the moon and Mac told her she'd been perfect. _Thud. Thud._ Their tail is gone and everything is _okay._

Despite this, despite knowing that they're in the clear, Riley can't get rid of an odd feeling she's had since she finally lost sight of him. She'd done well, she knows enough about this to say that for certain, it had been a good shake, and she can't quite explain it, the sense that maybe she hadn't shaken him at all.

Maybe the man had just… let them go.

They're all the way back home, literally walking through DXS to meet with Matty and debrief, and she still feels it. It's enough of a near-physical sensation that she pulls her jacket up higher, lets her hair out of its ponytail to cover the back of her neck. She tries to ignore it, tell herself that everything is fine, and focus on getting through this debrief and then going home.

The universe, it would appear, has different plans.

Mac has stopped dead in his tracks. Riley only notices when she's walked several feet past where he froze. She looks back at him, unease prickling back with a vengeance at the back of her neck, and then follows his gaze to where he's staring, looking for whatever it is that's shocked him into stillness. There's a man in DXS, standing inside the open door of a conference room with glass walls they can see easily into. He's a handsome man with brown skin and close cropped hair, posture reading like military. The front of his black t-shirt has a few words printed in neat white font up and to the right, just barely large enough for Riley to read it.

FBI Bomb Analytics.

As she reads the shirt, the man turns towards them, his face becoming fully visible, and prompting one word out of Mac. It's a name, surprised and confused.

"Charlie?"


	29. Broken Satellites

_i am SO nervous to be tackling this major of a storyline, i hope i did it justice! some things are the same, some are very different, overall it's some of my favorite work i've done._

_bear with me on the logistics of like, bombs and stuff. i'm studying law not explosives._

* * *

"Charlie?"

The name and the question hang together in the air as Mac stands, still rooted to the ground, staring at the strange man he obviously recognizes. Charlie, Riley would guess, given context clues, looks over and his face breaks into a wide grin.

"Mac! They told me you'd be back soon!"

Something about Charlie reacting to his presence seems to jolt Mac into action, be it confirmation that the man is actually here or what, Riley doesn't know. Whatever the reason may be, it does the trick, and Mac walks over to him with steps that quicken almost to a run by the time he reaches who Riley is now assuming to be an old friend. They meet each other in the middle, Mac's arms locking around Charlie's shoulders in a fierce hug, returned just as strongly, a fraction of a turn accompanying the embrace like Charlie was an inch from actually picking him up and spinning him around.

"It's damn good to see you," Riley hears Charlie say, voice muffled by the shock of blond hair partially obscuring his face.

Mac doesn't respond verbally, instead pulling one hand away from Charlie's back to ball into a fist and thump his shoulderblade before returning to its original spot. It's a shockingly open display for Mac, to hug someone like that and in the middle of DXS to boot, and Riley finds herself staring blatantly. A glance to her side shows Jack to be doing the same thing, clearly not having any better an idea of who this guy is than she's got. Nobody is there to explain what's going on, so the two of them are left to just wait for the several long seconds that pass before Mac and Charlie release each other, and someone says something containing useful information.

"I thought you were working at the New York office?" Mac asks once he's stepped back, though Charlie still keeps ahold of his shoulders for a moment, studying his face with a look Riley can't quite get a read on. Whatever he sees there, it's unclear if he's satisfied with it, but he does get his answer, given he lets Mac go completely and tucks his hands into his pockets, posture casual when he responds.

"Yeah, well, I was in town at a conference, I was supposed to be on a panel on time-delays when I got a call. Local guys were dealing with a suspicious package outside the Japanese consulate, they had some important diplomat in town for a meeting and he was getting a tour. When they saw what they were dealing with they called me."

Now, Riley feels like she has at least a little more information, gleaning what she can from what Charlie is saying. His shirt says FBI Bomb Analytics, so New York must mean the New York FBI field office, and he'd been in town on business, going by what he's said about the conference. Then there was an incident involving a bomb, one unique enough to warrant calling in a specific person, and Charlie is good enough at what he does to be that person. And he knows Mac. Very well, judging by the way they'd greeted each other.

"Look," Charlie sighs after a moment. The forced casualness has gone brittle at the edges and Riley, from where she hangs back, quiet and out of the way, observing with Jack, can see the same stiffness begin to seep into Mac at his tone. "I'll get right to it. We need to deal with this as fast as possible so we can talk in the car, but the local bomb squad has the device, and I need your eyes on it."

"Why my eyes?" The way Mac asks the question, slow and suspicious and a little sickened, leads Riley to believe he knows exactly what's coming next.

Despite this, when the answer comes, it still hits Mac like he's been shot.

"It's PETN, Mac. The explosive compound is pure PETN."

Any joy Mac had felt at seeing Charlie disappears from his face so fast that it's like Riley blinks and it's gone. His eyes have gone wide and cheeks pale, mouth slightly open and his hands at his sides suddenly shook by one quick, strong tremor. It appears for all the world like Mac is about to collapse into a heap on the ground at any moment, and the thought ignites a spark in Riley, sending her forward.

When she reaches him, Riley closes a hand around his upper arm, both to help ensure he stays upright and to remind him that they're here with him. It takes every ounce of self control she has not to go farther, to pull Mac behind her and put herself between him and Charlie. The fact that what he'd said had prompted such a strong reaction from Mac has stoked to life a roaring, protective fire in her chest, and she's sure it's burning in her eyes too as she stares straight at him. It doesn't help that she has no idea what it meant - PETN is a term she's never come across before.

The only thing preventing her from acting on this is the memory of just moments before, how Mac had, once he'd gotten over his initial shock of seeing Charlie there, hugged him without hesitation or restraint. The list of people Mac will let touch him like that, never mind initiate contact with, is very, very short, and Riley views her position on it as something of a sacred privilege - she hasn't even seen him hug Jack yet, though she suspects there's more behind that than simple skittishness around being touched. If Charlie is someone Mac is that comfortable with, he can't be a threat.

"What's going on here?" Jack asks from Mac's other side, and Riley nods sharply. She too would like to know the answer to that.

Mac shifts slightly under Riley's hand, weight moving from foot to foot as he clears his throat and seems to be attempting to wrestle back some measure of composure. When he finds it, he clears his throat again and says, "Sorry, uh, I should've- Guys, this is Charlie Robinson, old friend, we did some- some training together, when I first started." He indicates Riley, who's still holding onto his arm, saying to Charlie, "This is Riley Davis, she's our new computer analyst, and," he points towards his other side, "this is Jack Dalton. He's my partner."

"Your partner, huh," Charlie repeats with a flat tone, eyes narrowed and calculating as he looks at Jack.

It doesn't seem like an explanation he's happy about, and the reaction only makes Riley even more mystefied than ever. She isn't the only one who notices, though, and Mac is quick to cut in.

"No, he's- Jack's a good guy. He's not the same, I promise, this isn't like…" Mac trails off, looking from Charlie, to Jack, and back to Charlie again, like he's unable to find the words he's looking for to explain what this partnership 'isn't like', whatever history with his previous partners is apparently resulting in Charlie taking an immediate dislike to anyone holding the role. "He's good. You can trust him."

It's a strong statement, coming from Mac, and Charlie relaxes after another long moment of silence, nodding and breaking eye contact with Jack. Minutes later, she and Jack are sitting in the backseat of a car, while Charlie and Mac sit up front, all of them headed towards the Los Angeles Bomb Squad's office. As he drives, Charlie explains what they're dealing with, the bomb they'd found outside the Japanese consulate. It's been transported to the office after the first techs to arrive followed procedure to deactivate it, but the internal workings have yet to be closely examined. After they'd gotten a good look inside the thing, they'd called Charlie, who'd immediately gone to DXS in search of Mac as soon as he put together what the device had been made out of - that word Riley hadn't recognized, PETN.

"I don't have to spell out for you what this means," Charlie says when he finishes his explanation, turning into the parking lot of the building that houses the LAPD's bomb squad. Mac shakes his head, and just as she's about to pipe up, Jack acts first and says what's on Riley's mind for her.

"You kinda do for us, though, what the hell is going on?"

"The Ghost is back." Mac is the one who says it, voice soft and hollow. The words sound like they hurt him to say, and Riley feels a chill go down her spine.

"The Ghost," Jack repeats. "Please tell me you don't mean the rogue bomber who's on the FBI's most wanted list _and_ has an Interpol Red Notice out on him." The expression on Mac's face from where he's turned around in his seat, looking back at them, is enough of an answer on its own, even without the short nod. "Are you serious? You've had a run-in with the Ghost, and this is the first I'm hearing of it?"

Instead of answering, Mac shoves the car door open and gets out, shutting it behind him with slightly more force than strictly necessary. Charlie doesn't elaborate either, just sends a long look into the backseat. He opens his mouth like he's about to say something, then thinks better of it and just shakes his head, following Mac out of the car.

Jack, still staring out the window at Mac's swiftly leaving figure, looks guilty. Riley has to admit there were probably more delicate ways to have phrased that question, but it's not like there's anything they can do about the misstep now, and so she elbows him and gestures towards the door. They make it inside just in time to see Mac and Charlie disappear into the room where the bomb is evidently waiting for them. Just as Jack is about to open the door, the receptionist catches up to them and tells them, in a sheepish voice, that they're not allowed inside.

This leaves them relegated to waiting in a dimly lit, sparsely furnished hallway while Mac and Charlie suit up and go inside to take a look at the bomb. Waiting and Riley have never exactly been good friends, and today is no exception. She feels the empty silence between her and Jack push down on her shoulders, and she jumps up off the hall bench to try and shake it off, beginning to page the length of the floor.

"There's more to this than he's telling us," she says eventually, unable to help herself.

"Yeah, there is," Jack agrees. He doesn't ask who she means - he doesn't have to. It's pretty obvious. "And we're not gonna make him."

She looks at him, surprised at the calm tone of his voice. She'd have expected him to be a little more worked up about all of this - he doesn't handle not having the entire picture any better than she does. A look at his face tells her that while he may have sounded calm, it was more likely resignation she was hearing, exhausted resignation. Jack hates this as much as she does, but he's also right. They can't make him tell them anything, not just because Mac has proven himself to be as stubborn as he is smart, but because to try would be a violation of trust they can't afford to risk.

With a sigh, Riley drops back down onto the bench next to Jack. For what feels like a long time but is, really, according to her phone, about four minutes, nothing happens. No updates come out of the room, and there are no windows by which to see into it, and Riley feels like she's going stir-crazy. She's in the middle of wishing something interesting would happen if just to take her mind off the deepening spiral her thoughts are going down thinking about just how messed up Mac is over this 'Ghost' person, when the door flies open.

In a blur of forest-green bomb disposal equipment and frantic movements, Mac and Charlie bolt past her and Jack, sprinting for the front of the building. Riley is on her feet in an instant, Jack right behind her, both of them following the running pair out of the building and into the parking lot outside. Watching with horrified fascination, Riley sees Charlie pull up a manhole cover, Mac dumping something down it, then proceeding to drag a dumpster over the top of it and _hotwire a car_ to put that over the top of the dumpster lid.

There's just enough time before the bomb detonates beneath the dumpster for Riley to think that whoever the owner of the early model silver Toyota Camry is, they're about to have a really bad afternoon.

The explanation Riley and Jack recieve for what happened is truncated and difficult to understand, both of them talking over each other and oscillating between trying to keep things in simple layman's terms and using jargon Riley, as a computer rather than a bomb person, has trouble following. Essentially, she pieces out that this bomb was built of a very specific, very strong reactive agent, and contained a secondary device on the inside of it. A kind of failsafe that was built in to ensure that, even if the main explosive was diffused, there would still be massive casualties if anyone was around when the secondary was activated.

"It means we were right," Mac says at the conclusion of the explanation. There's an odd glint in his eye, a vacancy in his expression indicating that he's standing in front of them, he's talking, but he's not entirely there. Part of him is somewhere else, somewhere they can't reach him. "The Ghost is back."

Unable to explain the impulse that sends her focus downwards, Riley notices his hands, hanging at his sides, and the way they're shaking, ever so slightly.

Apparently, Charlie has noticed this too. He reaches out, his own hand curling around Mac's forearm and pulling him gently away, saying, "Okay. Come here for a second." Looking over Mac's shoulder when Jack takes an abrupt step forward, maintaining his initial distance from Mac, Charlie says, slightly louder, "I just need a word with Mac here real quick, then he's all yours, 'kay?"

To his credit, Jack just nods, folding his arms and stepping back again.

They're only a step away, shoulders turned in some semblance of privacy, but Riley can hear pretty clearly what it is Charlie says next.

"Listen, I know what this has dragged up," he tells Mac, quiet and sad. "I know what's going on in your head, kid. Just. Go home. Get some sleep tonight, we'll take up the investigation in the morning, okay? I'll call you if I need you."

Personally, Riley thinks it's a great idea. Whatever Charlie is referring to that this bomb has 'dragged up, it's bad, and it's tearing Mac apart inside. She can see it, and she wants to help, knows Jack does too, but there's nothing they can do standing here outside the LAPD bomb squad office. Going home sounds like an excellent plan. Mac doesn't seem to agree. He's already shaking his head before Charlie has finished talking, and when he answers, it's too soft for Riley to make out.

They go back and forth for a minute, Mac and Charlie, arguing quietly about sending Mac home, and Riley only catches one word before Mac finally agrees. She thinks it's a name - it sounded like Al.

Before they take their leave, Charlie stops Mac, pulling him once more into a fierce hug. Mac returns it just as tightly, and Riley could swear she sees a tremor going through his back under his friend's hand. Something is very wrong with Mac, and she has no idea what it is. The thought dogs her as she watches Charlie let Mac go, giving his shoulder a quick, gentle shake before going back inside. There's something going on here, and not knowing what it is eats her alive.

With Charlie back in the building and Mac refusing to look either of them in the eye, the team stands there on the sidewalk for several long, empty seconds. The day shines bright and beautiful around them, a commotion in the near distance audible from the bomb squad guys dealing with the cleanup from the explosive that went off under the dumpster and car. Riley wonders which one of them is going to get up the nerve to ask it first, picking at the seam of her pants with one fingernail as she tries to talk herself into it.

Jack beats her to it when he asks, softer than Riley remembers hearing him talk since she was twelve years old, "Mac, who is Al?"

It's amazing that Mac can hear him at all over the rushing sound in his ears, like the noise you hear when you listen hard to the inside of a shell. The sound of your own pulse, blood throbbing through your head, faint tinnitus in the background behind it.

_Was._ For a split second Mac almost corrects Jack, changes the 'is' to 'was,' who _was_ Al, because Al isn't any more, hasn't been for years. Hasn't been since Mac got him killed. He doesn't want to tell them at the same time he knows he has to, both because of the new mission handed to them by Charlie and because they need to know. If this team, whatever this is beyond that that's forming between them is to keep going, is to be honest and genuine and open as it has to be if it's going to survive, they need to know what happened.

"I can't go home," is what he finally says, and he's proud of how his voice barely shakes. They both frown at him, and Mac shakes his head, insisting again, "We have to go somewhere, but it can't be DXS and it can't be home, because Bozer might be there, and if he's home and I have to talk to him, I- If I see Bozer right now, like this, I'll break and I'll tell him everything. I can't lie to him like this so you have to take me- we have to go somewhere else."

They end up at Riley's apartment. Jack walks just a step behind him and to his right like he thinks Mac is going to collapse at any moment, and the hovering would be maddeningly annoying were it not for the intent behind it, the protectiveness Mac can feel radiating from the man behind him. He sits on Riley's couch, staring at the countertops of her kitchen across the semi-open floor plan of her apartment, and tries to figure out how to say any of this without losing his cool entirely, breaking down right there in front of them.

To his right on the couch is Jack, and perched on the edge of the coffee table to his left is Riley, and neither of them is saying anything. They're waiting, patiently, for Mac to start talking, and eventually, he does. Piece by piece, the whole story comes out.

Alfred Peña had been working with EOD when he'd been recruited by James MacGyver, some time before Mac officially signed on with DXS. He'd been highly skilled and even more highly praised by those who worked with him, commending his cool under pressure, his firm but friendly demeanor, and his knack for being able to break even the most complex procedure down into its simplest components. It was for his experience as an EOD training officer that he was tapped for a special assignment - to be the partner and assist with the training of the newest field agent, and the Director's son.

They'd spent nearly every day together for weeks on end. In the beginning, when Mac was first being trained, he hadn't seen much of James at all. He wasn't even allowed into the field for a lowball mission for months, leaving just he and Al to work together, running drills and simulations and learning the ins and outs of what's going to keep him alive. By the time he'd been allowed into the field at all - his partner grumbling under his breath that it was too early, he was still too green - he and Al had grown close.

Al had been to the house for dinner countless times, along with Charlie, an old trainee of his from his EOD days newly making a career for himself in the FBI. Mac had conversely been to the Peña house as well, met his partner's wife, his toddler daughter. Al had been there on birthdays and on holidays. He'd been there for every day Mac exceeded James's impossible expectations, and every day he'd failed under them. He'd been there for all of it, and it felt like it was going to last forever.

Until the Ghost.

"He wouldn't let me go in the building." Mac keeps his eyes fixed on the paperclip in his hands, twisting it so tightly his fingers blanch, bloodless. It hurts, the press of the thin strip of metal into his fingertips. "We'd been chasing this bomber, right, the Ghost. Everybody was after him, Al kept saying it was too soon, I wasn't ready, but the Director said I was, and besides, we couldn't just ignore it, he was trying to assassinate a Senator. He'd made one attempt already, got foiled by dumb luck, and we knew he was going to try again. We had a really shaky lead but it was our only lead, and it led us to this warehouse. Al said he had a bad feeling about it. I thought-"

He has to stop, swallowing hard around the painful lump in his throat, eyes stinging so sharply he closes them. Mac waits for a moment to collect himself before speaking again, wanting to be sure that his voice doesn't quiver like he knows it's trying to. He resolutely still does not look at Jack, ignores the soft sound that's come from Riley. If he's going to push through the rest of this, he can't acknowledge them, can't even think about the fact that they're here, they're within arm's reach, all he'd have to do was put out a hand and they'd...

"I thought it was nothing," Mac forces himself to say. The words burn coming out of his mouth but he doesn't stop, he continues. If it hurts, it's only what he deserves. "But he was really insistent about it. Told me he was going to go in first, check it out, and radio the all-clear for me to follow. So I decided I'd go back to the car for something I'd forgot, and when I turned around…"

_The force of the blast knocks him down. Mac's head bounces off the car, dazing him and taking him to his knees. It takes several long seconds for his vision to clear, for the haze of pain and disorientation to part long enough to remember that someone had been inside that building. That Al had been inside that building._

_Mac tries to scream, but he can't. The smoke, billowing out away from the fire licking out of the gaping wound in the side of the warhouse, is too thick to get any words out. Al's name sticks in his throat, feels like it's tearing him apart from the inside out, and Mac doubles over, small pieces of rock from the unpaved road biting into his palms. No matter how hard he fights, he can't speak, and he can't get up, all he can do is lose himself in the blinding pain of what's just happened._

_Al is dead. His partner is dead. Al is _dead _and it's _his fault.

_That's where they find him, when Deputy Director Thornton didn't get an answer on comms and sent someone out. Collapsed there on the gravel, coughing on smoke and choking on grief, sobbing into the ground so hard he's almost lost consciousness at least once._

_When he wakes up in the hospital hours later, James is there. He stands at the end of Mac's bed and for a long, long moment, doesn't speak. When he finally does, all he says is, "He was a good man. It's a tragedy."_

_Mac throws up in the basin left by his bed. He shoves off the hand James sets briefly on his shoulder, and barely hears the door close as his father leaves. He's alone until Charlie gets there, bursts in the door with wide eyes and a dozen questions Mac doesn't have the words to answer. All that makes it out is, hoarse and guilt-stricken, "I'm sorry."_

_They don't see the Ghost again. Despite the months of work put in to try and track him down, to find the man that killed Mac's training supervisor, his partner, they don't come up with so much as a trace. The man has followed through on his name and vanished, evaporating into the air as if he'd never been anything but smoke._

By the time he's finished, Mac is clinging to his composure by the barest thread. His lungs feel tight and bruised, his throat working as he tries to swallow around a cry he can't let out. He finally makes the mistake of looking to the side, right as a rogue tear breaks free of his tight rein on himself and streaks down his face, and there's Jack. Looking at him like Mac's just stuck a knife in his gut and twisted, and with his posture angled deliberately open. It's like he's issuing a silent invitation, saying to Mac without saying anything at all, _I'm here, I'm here, if you just let yourself fall and break I'm here to catch the pieces._

Not taking that offer, allowing himself to collapse over like a marionette with his strings slash and sob his grief and guilt away in Jack's arms, is an act of will that seizes Mac's body like a physical pain. The strength it takes to not give in is enormous, a searing ache through his back and up over his shoulders, and he looks down again, hand balled into a fist on his thigh to keep it from reaching out to Jack, a silent answer to a silent offer, _Help me, please. I need you._

"Jesus, Mac." Riley is the one to break the silence that's fallen, and Mac is infinitely grateful to her for it. He scrubs his wrist over his face, breathing in quick pants to try and quell the turbulence churning in his chest, and looks at her. "That's- I'm so sorry."

Nodding, Mac shifts a little on the couch, putting just that fraction more space between himself and Jack, closer to Riley. She's safer ground, the dynamic between them easier to handle. Mac's never had a sister before, it's a concept unburdened, completely new. Fathers, now that's another story entirely. One he can't even bear to think about when the storm of fire and death that had cut Al's life so cruelly, unfairly short is still so fresh in his memory, heating his face like he could still see it if he squinted at the right angle.

She doesn't try and ask him anything more, not about Al or about the Ghost, and neither does Jack. Mac still tries to avoid looking at him, focusing instead on Riley, who watches him with a half-panicked look for a while before abruptly lurching into motion and grabbing a game of Mancala out of the hallway cupboard. Jack grabs a magazine out of a basket while she goes, sitting back and pretending to read it while Riley returns with the box. As she dishes out the marbles into the dishes carved into the wood board of the game, her hand hesitates and then darts out, closing over his wrist.

Like he's been drowning and finally seized hold of a lifeline, Mac flips his hand over and grips hers back just as hard, knuckles going white and fingers aching with the strength of the hold. If the force of the connection hurts at all, Riley doesn't betray it. She merely clings onto him, giving as good as she gets, their near-bruised hands locked together over the Mancala board in a conversation for which there are no words.

By the time she lets him go and finishes dishing out the game, Mac feels some fraction shored up, the hurricane ravaged skeleton house of his body boarded up enough that he might be able to stay standing, if even just for one more day. They sit on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table and play three rounds of the game, and Riley says nothing when his shaking hands repeatedly knock flattened marbles over into the wrong dish, silently fishing them out for him and setting things to rights. Behind them, Jack continues pretending to read his magazine, a cover for watching over them the way Mac knows he's doing.

Another several games pass before Mac's phone goes off, buzzing to life on the polished surface of Riley's coffee table with a rattling vibration. His startled flinch sends his knee banging into the bottom of the table, and he covers his embarrassment by snatching it up and climbing to his feet. Walking over to the far living room window, Mac looks down at the screen, noting the name and feeling his heart skip twice at seeing who it is that's calling him.

_CHARLIE ROBINSON_

"I'm sorry, I know I told you to go home, but-" Charlie's voice is hurried and stressed, a tone Mac has barely heard out of him a handful of times over the years they've been friends. "They just got the call at bomb squad while I was picking through what was left of the one left at the consulate. Someone's spotted another device."

Mac tries to ask and can't. His throat is too tight and his face too hot. He feels dizzy and scared and grits his teeth, shoving it all down because he can't afford to be scared right now. There will be time for that later, when he's locked himself alone in his room - now, he has to show up and do for Al what he couldn't years ago. He coughs, clears his throat, and forces the question out.

"Where?"

"The same Senator, he's giving a speech, it was called in a block away. It's his old target, Mac, the job he never finished because we caught onto him and started chasing. This is what he came back for. The Ghost is here to finish what he started."


	30. Palms Out (At Your Mercy Now)

_soooooooo here it is. i think we've all been waiting for this one, which y'know, only makes me that much more nervous about posting it. as a heads up, this chapter is... an intense one._

_thirty, wow. never thought i'd get THIS far! chapter title from sleeping at last's song atlas: eight._

_enjoy! [runs and hides]_

* * *

Senator Roger Delaney has got to be both one of the luckiest and the unluckiest men Mac has ever had occasion to peripherally cross paths with. This is the second time in his brief tenure in office that one of the world's deadliest and most wanted criminals has set crosshairs on him, but it's also the second time that - with any degree of luck and skill - Mac and his team will foil the attempt before it can so much as singe the lapel of the Senator's jacket.

Once again, Charlie is filling them in on what they're headed for while they're in the car, though this time he's on speakerphone rather than sitting in the seat next to Mac's. His slightly tinny, vaguely electronically distorted voice fills the air of the car, briefing them in a rush as they speed towards the scene. He goes over the Senator and the event - the kickoff of his re-election campaign, as he rounds the corner headed towards the end of his first six year term in office. Overall he seems like an odd target, a well-liked politician slated to win his campaign in a landslide despite one or two challengers popping up who didn't hold any particularly controversial stances for the makeup of his constituent base.

Best theory they have in the moment is that the original contract may have been related to his personal life in some way, or maybe someone wanting to make a big statement by ordering the death of a young, popular politician in the early stages of a promising career. This second attempt on Delaney's life, though, that one's a lot easier to figure out. The Ghost does not seem like the kind of man who leaves things unfinished.

"Who first called it in?" The question comes from Jack in the driver's seat, eyes focused on the road but speaking loudly enough that Charlie will be able to hear him from the speaker in Mac's phone, held aloft between them.

A sigh like static crackles over the call. "We don't know. It was anonymous, direct to the LAPD bomb squad office. Mentioned the Ghost by name, and then when they asked who he was, the man hung up. They tracked the phone, it was a payphone with no surveillance, there's no prints, the whole thing's kind of a dead end."

With a glance over his shoulder, Mac makes eye contact with Riley, whose twisted grimace reflects the same discomfort he feels at this information. It's unnerving to say the least, but there's nothing to be done about it now. There's a much more pressing issue presently demanding their attention.

When they arrive at the cross street intersection Charlie directed them to, it's pandemonium. People are running this way and that, security and first responders attempting to control crowds of event attendees that seem to range between confused, irritated, and panicked. Charlie flags them down and says something to a uniformed officer standing at the cordon blocking off the street, prompting her to let them through. Mac flashes the woman a quick smile and nods at her as they pass, then turns his focus to Charlie.

He fills them in on the scant developments since they'd hung up as they approach the area where the device was reported, a city-issue garbage can between a pair of benches. Matty is on her way now, apparently, and James has also been notified, a fact that Mac tries to forget as soon as he learns it. The bomb is in view now, a perimeter marked off within the larger area preventing even the majority of emergency personnel restricted from approaching. Charlie is giving him the specifics they've been able to note about the device when Mac notices that Jack isn't paying attention at all, looking in the opposite direction.

In the space between when he noticed this and the irritated snap that's forming in his mouth making it out into the world, Mac stops, swallowing it down, because now he's noticed something else, something beyond Jack's seeming disregard for the very dangerous situation they're in. There's an odd look on Jack's face, a calculating frown sitting on his forehead, brows furrowed down over narrowed eyes. He's scanning, looking for something. Jack isn't not paying attention - he's just paying attention to something else.

"What's going on, Jack?" Mac asks, and beside him, both Charlie and Riley fall silent. They must see the same thing Mac does, because they don't start talking again, waiting for the same answer he is.

"There's two of them," is Jack's completely meaningless response. His eyes flick to the side and he must notice the look of complete mystification replicated in triplicate across Mac, Riley, and Charlie's faces. "The mobile LAPD unit is parked back there with the ambulance and a couple squad cars, right? There's another one. At the end of the street there, see?" He points now, towards a dark blue cube van parked indeed at the end of the street, LAPD painted on the side in blocky yellow. It's true, Jack is right. They'd passed one on their way in that was identical to the one they're looking at now.

Almost identical.

At the moment it clicks for Mac, it seems to do so as well for the man standing outside it, LAPD cap pulled low over his forehead and sunglasses blocking a good portion of his face. The man sees Jack pointing, notes their attention towards him, and turns around, flinging open the back doors of the mobile command center - or what had looked like a mobile command center.

Jack has taken off running before he's gotten the words out, floating over his shoulder when he shouts, "It's him, he's there! That's him!"

"Go," Charlie tells Mac, shoving at his shoulder, propelling him after Jack. "I have this one, go, _go!"_

With Riley on his heels, Mac follows after Jack as fast as he can. He's fast enough to get there just as the Ghost disappears out the other side of the van and Jack hops up into it, ready to follow him. The sound Mac hears is faint but unmistakable, and he hasn't even consciously processed it before he's skidded to a halt, pursuing the Ghost forgotten in favor of the order that rips out of him, a desperate shout, "Jack, _stop!"_

The world slows and narrows down to moments and the space between them, to Mac's heart pounding against his ribcage and the echoing click of a mechanism locking into place, reverberating around inside Mac's skull from the moment Jack's foot presses the plate down and activates what lies beneath it. There's another bomb. The Ghost planted another bomb, disguised as an LAPD mobile command unit car, able to move its way to the center of a crisis without drawing suspicion, and now Jack is standing on it. Jack's boot, planted on that plate, holding its place, is the only thing preventing it from detonating.

"Don't move," Mac says. He knows he's talking too loud, if he can hear his own voice over the rush in his head. "Don't move, don't move."

Blessedly, mercifully, Jack doesn't move. His eyes sweep over Charlie and Riley and then land on Mac.

"Am I gonna die here?" he asks, and Mac's heart gives a sharp, screaming pulse. Grief rolls over him so fast and so heavy that it takes his breath away. In the seconds between the question was asked and when he comes up with the air for an answer, Mac lives through Jack's funeral a hundred times over.

"You will if you move," Mac tells him truthfully, lungs full of splintering fiberglass. He can't bear to look at Jack, at the fear and horror dawning over the face of the man he's become to see as an unshakable pillar of calm and strength, but neither can he look away. It's not as if Jack can look away from this - why should Mac have that luxury? So he looks Jack right in the eye and says, "If you move, the detonator will activate and the bomb will go off."

Slowly, jerkily, Jack nods. His cheeks are reddened and Mac can see that there's a slight tremor in his hands. The sight nearly makes him lose his breath again.

"I'm gonna," Mac says, unable to stand it any longer and looking away, "I have to- I have to find the explosives, figure out what we're dealing with." He moves back a step then forces himself to look back, to make eye contact with Jack once more and repeat the first thing he thought of to say when he'd first seen the pressure plate, the wire visible under it. "Don't move."

Rounding the side of the box truck feels like cowardice disguised as proactive problem solving, but Mac doesn't let himself think about that too hard. He feels with unsteady hands around every possible corner, searching for whatever that trip wire is attached to, and tries to ignore the way his breathing is speeding up by the moment. The sound of the crowd pushed back past the caution tape is a dull, pulsing roar in his ears, and his breaths come in quick, sharp little pants, pained and shallow. Mac can feel himself losing his composure and he stops for a moment, hunched over bent knees, trying to force himself to calm down enough to do what he has to do. To save Jack's life.

It's hard, when he can hear them talking back there, hear the breaking in Jack's voice and the questions Riley is now asking him about fantasy football. She's trying to keep him calm, keep him from panicking even as Mac hunches over around the corner doing that very thing, because if Jack panics, then he's going to die.

The truth of his situation follows moments after. If _Mac_ panics, Jack is also going to die.

"Mac." The voice that catches his attention is firm and just loud enough to break through the haze of this thought running on a circular track through his brain. "Mac, look at me."

Forcing himself to straighten up and turn around enough to look at Charlie is a feat of strength and will Mac wouldn't have guessed he still had at that moment. His friend is standing there with a grim but determined look on his face, giving off the air that Mac himself should be projecting right now, were he able to keep his act together long enough to save his partner's life.

"Charlie, what if I can't do this?" The words come out barely above a whisper. Mac's hand goes out, bracing himself against the side of the truck. "What if I screw up, and he- and Jack- I can't-"

"Hey." The command is direct and accompanied by Charlie's hand, gripping Mac's forearm, the one extended out towards the truck. "You have to cut it out, Mac, you can't afford to even think like that right now. Think about Al. What did Al say?"

_Al doesn't like James. It's obvious to Mac every time the two men are in the same room, the tight set to Al's jaw and the overly polite tone to his voice when he speaks. Mac can't honestly say he blames his partner for this, he knows his father can be abrasive, especially when you haven't already spent years dealing with him, and Mac has a tendency to bring out the worst in James. _

_That's what happened today. It's hard for Mac to even recall how it started, the minor disagreement that escalated to James's swift exit, punctuated by shouting and a slammed door. The pinched look of disapproval had lingered on Al's face for a while after he left, while Mac just stood there in the center of the room, staring blankly at the closed door. They'd been in the middle of going over notes from an exercise they'd gone through the day before when James showed up, down on the sub-floor Al did most of Mac's training from. _

_Moving on after that is difficult. Mac can't concentrate, his hands won't stay still, he keeps losing track of what step he's on. They're going over bombs again today, and Mac has the detonator in his hands, diffusing it. Or, trying to, anyway. He fumbles at the last second, and there's a loud click._

"_Bomb just went off," Al says from where he's leaned against a table, watching. "You're dead now, Mac."_

"_We'll restart it." Mac bends down to the floor, picking up the tools and pieces he'd already dismantled and discarded. "I'll reset the dummy device, we'll do it again. I'll get it right this time, I've just gotta-"_

"_No, that's enough for today, I think."_

_Al drives him home, and they're silent until they reach Mac and Bozer's house._

"_Hey," Al says, just as Mac's about to get out of the car. "Hang on, I want to talk to you for a minute."_

_Mac does as he's told. Tries not to let the prickles of anxious adrenaline sparking from his spine and across his shoulders, all the way down to his fingertips, make any change to the look on his face. _

"_What happened today," Al says, in a voice that is firm but not harsh, "cannot happen in the field."_

"_I know." Mac looks straight forward out the windshield of the car. His fingers dig into his pants, one leg jittering slightly on the car floor. "I'm sorry."_

"_No, I don't need you to be sorry. I need you to listen. One of the most important things you're ever going to learn is this. Remember what I said about the bomb?"_

"_The bomb doesn't have feelings about me."_

"_Exactly. And that goes for everything else too, you know. In the field. When you're doing what we do here, Mac, you have to find a way to turn it all off. When you've got a job like that in front of you, you have to figure out how to stop being a person. In that moment, you don't have a spouse, you don't have children, you don't have siblings or friends. You don't have parents. It's just the task in front of you."_

_Mac nods silently, slowly absorbing what Al is saying, trying to process it. He's thrown off all over again when Al continues, saying pointedly, "When you have something like defusing a bomb, or any of the other life or death moments you're going to run into, Mac, the Director? Your father? He doesn't exist. Nothing he's ever done or said exists. It's you and the detonator, and that's all."_

_Again, Mac nods. He speaks too, this time, saying with a steadiness he's proud of, "Okay." For a moment he thinks they're done, his hand hovering over the doorhandle, until Al's voice stops him once more._

"_There's a catch, though. You could end up thinking, and a lot of people are going to try and tell you this is true, that you have to be that way all the time. That the best thing you can do is shut yourself down, turn yourself into a robot or a shadow or something like that. They're wrong. That's just as dangerous. Hold onto your humanity as hard as you can, kid, just know when to put it away somewhere safe. And never forget to take it back out again."_

"The bomb doesn't have feelings about me," Mac says out loud, and Charlie nods.

"Exactly. Now, can you do this?" The offer is unspoken behind the question, that Charlie will take over if Mac needs him to.

And for just a second, Mac considers it. Quicker than anything, though, that second passes, and he nods firmly. "I can do this," he says, and doesn't even think about whether he meant it or not. He has to. There's no other option.

"There he is," Charlie says approvingly, nodding. "I'm gonna get back to our other one, okay? There's no remote trigger receiver I can see, but it's still live."

"Go," Mac tells him, voice strong. When he takes his hand off the side of the truck, it's steady and still. "I can handle this."

And he does. Mac locates the explosives, and the strength and volatility of them are filed safely away as factual information, diverted from the part of his brain shut in a lockbox, screaming stories of what compounds like this do to human bodies when ignited under them. He identifies where they're rigged to, one detonator under the pressure plate and another in the wall. The wall has to go first, or they'll trigger it when they defuse the pressure plate. Information orders itself into neat rows in his mind, and Mac's eyes flick back and forth through thin air, following it as it all clicks into place. He knows what he has to do.

Finishing his hurried explanation to Riley, Jack, Charlie, and Matty, who's just arrived, Mac turns to go, to sprint off and gather what he's going to need to make this work. They must have left shortly after one another, because he runs into none other than the Director himself as he ducks under the cordon tape, leaving the immediate scene towards a hotdog cart he remembers noticing on the way in. Mac stops and stares openly for a moment, then firmly clamps down on anything that comes bubbling up and turns away.

"Angus," James starts, voice sharp and disapproving, and Mac doesn't waste a second. He ignores his father completely, continuing single-mindedly on his goal. Nothing exists right now except for that bomb.

It comes together piece by piece, fitting into a perfectly cut puzzle that is, from an objective standpoint, beautiful. Everything clicks exactly the way it's supposed to, and all that's left is to twist the contraption he's made and pull away the bolt in the wall holding the detonator's connection together. Mac's hands are on it, about to start twisting, when Jack's stops him.

"It's not your fault," he says, and Mac goes still, risking a glance up. Jack smiles at him, the look on his face wide open and full of agonizingly tender affection. The words hold the same, gentle and kind. Forgiving. "No matter what happens, Mac, none of this was ever your fault. And I don't regret a minute of it. I don't regret you, kid, okay? Don't matter what happens."

Mac can't breathe, and he almost feels it all slam back, everything he's shut so carefully down to be anything other than a panicking wreck on the ground. There cannot be room for that to happen, though, so he grits his teeth, looks at Jack for one long moment, and starts twisting. Slowly, impossibly slowly, it all falls into place and by the time it's over, Mac has lost time. His memory goes blank, and then it's over, the bolt is on the ground, and Jack's knee is bending, about to lift his foot off the plate.

Barely in time, Mac shouts for him to stop, lurching forward, almost falling onto the step into the back of the truck. He grabs for his Swiss Army knife, barely able to feel his own fingers at that point, and pulls out the scissors. The wire protruding from beneath the pressure plate is muted green, coated in deceptively innocuous plastic, a dormant viper ready to strike at any moment.

There's the quiet, anticlimactic snip of the scissors, the wire is clipped through, and just like that, it's over.

The breath rushes out of Mac's lungs so loudly Jack can somehow hear it over the sound of his own thundering heartbeat. The bomb is defused. He's not going to die today.

The street lurches into chaos and Mac is swept backwards, stumbling easily away without an ounce of resistance. His eyes are wide and shocked in his ash-pale face where Jack catches a glimpse of him. The crowd bears him away before Jack can say anything, before anything but a moment of eye contact can pass between them, and then he's gone.

Relief is a powerful drug. Jack barely comprehends the next few minutes. He feels it in fits and bursts, the way Riley hugs him like it would've been devastating to lose him, the quick exchange he has with Matty asking if anyone has eyes on Mac. They don't, and he's looking around distractedly, when the Director catches his attention. The look on James MacGyver's face is almost bored as he gestures over towards the far side of the street. Mac is sitting there on the curb, Charlie next to him, and Jack's chest throbs.

"Have you talked to him?" he asks, and he could've sworn it was either a trick of the light or James actually rolled his eyes.

"His work here is done, he's free to go."

"His work here is…" Jack trails off, hoping he's just heard wrong. This isn't the case, and before he can say anything potentially dangerous to his continued employment as Mac's partner, James is brushing past him.

"Yes, his work is done, now if you'll excuse me, I need to have a word with the Senator. Never hurts to have a man like that owe you one, Dalton, which you'd know if you had a political bone in your body."

It's not the jab at Jack's management skills or lack thereof that gets to him. It's the fact that, while Mac's job here might be done, Mac's father's job certainly isn't. And while James walks off to score points with a potential powerful ally, his son sits within eyesight, obviously moments from having a breakdown. Well, Jack thinks, if James isn't going to step up, one of them ought to.

"Go, get him," Matty says, and Jack looks down, surprised. He'd almost forgotten she was there until she spoke. It's obvious from her face that she's as disgusted with James's comment as Jack himself is, though the look fades as she turns her attention away, nodding towards Mac. "Take him home."

By the time Jack pulls up outside of Mac's house, the sun is hanging low on the horizon. The day still has that hazy, trembling feel that he supposes the clinical term for is probably 'shock', and he blinks out the window, squinting at the blue, blue sky. There are no clouds today. He doesn't know why this is holding his focus when Mac is in the passenger's seat next to him, so tightly wound he's worried the kid might snap at any moment. Maybe that's exactly why.

Of all of it, the entire nightmare of an afternoon, there's one thing that Jack keeps coming back to, seeing every time he closes his eyes even just long enough to blink. Mac's face as the crowd of DXS and local emergency personnel swept him back and away, pale and stricken. Jack's never seen him look like that. The closest he's ever come before now was back in Minnesota, in that blanched white landscape when Mac seemed to think for just a breath of a moment that Jack had caught a bullet.

Some combination of this thought, the mental image of Mac's wide blue eyes, and residual generalized panic left over from the part where he almost got blown sky-high has him getting out of the car when Mac does, elbowing the door shut behind him. It sounds like a gunshot, or an explosion, metal on metal when the frame connects and latches, and Jack manages to reign in a flinch. Mac doesn't, or is unsuccessful in doing so. His head jerks to the side just slightly, away from the car, eyes snapping shut.

After a few moments of a quiet that is too still and too lifeless, Mac straightens up and turns away, towards the house down the drive. Jack watches him for a moment, then turns back towards the car, pulling the door open and just lifting his foot to step back into the car when something stops him. A voice. Mac's said his name, and Jack starts to look over at him, to ask what's wrong. Before he can get farther than looking back over his shoulder, an impact rocks him forward, forcing him to take a step towards the car to avoid losing his balance.

It's like Jack's brain goes on lag, seconds passing molasses-slow until he processes what's happened. There are now arms wrapped tightly around his waist, a face pressed between his shoulder blades. He can feel the rapid breathing of the person clutching him so desperately, hear their small whooping gasps, and it sinks in. Mac is hugging him. Mac is hugging him and, judging by that feeling, those sounds, he's crying.

Jack stands there, stunned, trying to figure out what to do. He hardly wants to breathe for the fear he'll spook Mac, scare him off and put an abrupt end to this breakthrough he's been waiting months for. But there's only so much he can take before he shifts, lightly pulling to dislodge Mac's grip so he can turn around.

"Sorry," Mac is saying as Jack is finally able to turn around. He's trying to back away, movements clumsy and disorganized, hands coming up to his own face as they pull swiftly away from Jack, as fast as if he'd been burned. It's like he's trying to force himself to calm down and stop crying, but it's too late. His face gleams wet in the gold light of the setting sun and his eyes are red. "Sorry, I- Sorry-" The words are breathless and small, beyond ashamed and it's very clear what Mac thinks is happening. He thinks he's finally taken an impossible step forward, only to be swiftly rejected when he got there, and Jack can't find the words to tell him it isn't true.

So he doesn't try. Instead he reaches out, taking ahold of Mac's raised forearm, his hitching shoulder, and gently tugs. Mac's apologies are interrupted by a sudden sob, shaking his head and scrubbing his hands at his face.

_Just let me hold you,_ Jack thinks and doesn't say, his own eyes stinging fiercely. He doesn't release his grip on Mac, instead applies fractionally more directional force, refusing to let Mac take another step backwards, away from what he's finally ready to admit he needs. _Please, kid, for once just let me hold you._

It's slow and stumbling, but it's not hard to pull him. He doesn't put up any kind of resistance. By the time Jack is able to close his own arms around his partner, he's mercifully stopped trying to say he's sorry, apologies lost to wordless, grieving cries. Jack squeezes his eyes shut and takes a deep, steadying breath, tucking Mac close against his chest and hugging him hard. The body in his arms shudders and shakes, his shirt where Mac's face is pressed against it growing hot and damp. Jack's hand runs over Mac's heaving upper back, feels the way he's still so rigidly tense, like if he relaxes even a fraction he'll fall and never get back up again.

"It's okay," Jack says, just loud enough to be heard over the sound of Mac's broken weeping. "I've got you. It's okay."

That's what does it. Mac's arms start pushing at him, pulling away just far enough to get them back around Jack. His fingers dig into the fabric of Jack's shirt, sure to leave wrinkles in the shape of two grasping fists. The strength goes out of him in an instant and any restraint left in Mac collapses as his body slumps forward, all his weight now against Jack's chest. The moment he gives in is accompanied by the worst sound Jack has ever heard, a raw, keening wail from somewhere deep in Mac's throat, muffled in Jack's collarbone.

"I've got you," Jack says again, his own voice wet and cracked. There's a headache beginning to build at the base of his skull and he feels close to breaking down and crying himself. He cups the back of Mac's head, fingers woven through bright blond hair, and tells him once more, "I've got you, kid." It's a promise and a praise, an encouragement for the massive vulnerability Mac is displaying now, the danger he surely believes he's putting himself in by allowing Jack to not only see him break down like this, but to hold him as he does.

They're there in the driveway together, Mac shaking to pieces in Jack's arms, Jack with his cheek pressed to the top of Mac's head talking nonsense to him in a low tone, for a long time. It's long enough that eventually Jack lowers them both to sit down on the pavement next to the car. He takes care not to push Mac away even a fraction in doing so, keeping him as close as possible, though for whose benefit he couldn't entirely say. Eventually Mac seems to run out of energy, violent sobs petered out into trembling breaths, bonelessly limp against Jack's chest. Still, Jack doesn't let go. He's not moving until Mac does, he's already decided, doesn't matter if this continues for a minute or an hour.

Jack never had children. The thought wanders idly through his mind as he watches the dying sun shine through the branches of the tree down the street. He doesn't know what it's like to have a son. He'd imagine, though, this is what it feels like to hold yours while he shatters. With this thought comes the realization, quiet and anticlimactic, that he would die, literally physically die right here and now, if it meant Mac would never hurt like this again. Jack lets this sit in his mind for a moment, palm splayed over Mac's back, feeling him breathe with the rise and fall of the ribcage under his palm.

This moment isn't going to last forever. Soon enough, Mac will sit up and move away, Jack will pull them both off the ground, and they'll go inside. For now, though, Jack has a lot of lost time to make up for.


	31. Pull You Down, Put You To Bed

_i'm glad you enjoyed The Hug Chapter (FINALLY!) and i hope you enjoy what's in store next!_

_enjoy this chapter, a bit of decompressing after all of that._

_(title from mother mother's 'family')_

* * *

When the car pulls into the driveway outside and the sound of the engine gets Bozer's attention, he's carrying a basket of folded laundry back to his room. It's quite sizeable, given it is the result of having put off that particular chore until he literally couldn't any more, and so after he verifies the car in the drive is one he recognizes, he opts to finish putting it away before coming to the hall to greet his roommate. It's a little odd that, as he pulls open drawers and returns neatly folded piles of fabric to their rightful homes, Bozer doesn't hear the front door open. It doesn't take that long to walk from the car to the front door, but it's not like Mac hasn't ever been known to linger for a moment, exchanging a few last words with Jack before coming inside, so he doesn't pay too much mind to it. Until he finishes with the laundry and comes back out to an empty house, Mac having still not come back inside yet.

Bozer frowns and tries to ignore the growing unease in his chest, trying to tell himself that he probably got sidetracked bickering with Jack about something unimportant. They both have a tendency to dig in on the most ridiculous stuff, each refusing to give in until they've been going back and forth on the same irrelevant point of contention for twenty-plus minutes. Last time, Bozer thinks it was about whether the neighbors down the way had two almost identical cats who took turns sitting in the front window, or if there was just one who sat in the window nearly constantly and looked slightly different depending on the lighting. He'd thought Riley was kidding when she'd texted him about that one, but then they'd still been going when they walked inside the house, and no, that really was what they were at each other about this time.

Eventually, it's been too long even for Mac and Jack to be locked in some ridiculous argument - they'd have just brought it inside by now, it's still early enough in the year that it starts getting chilly this late in the day - and Bozer walks to a window, pulling aside the curtain and squinting outside. What he sees makes his heart stutter in his chest, breath catching in his throat, his whole body going cold. Mac and Jack are, sure enough, still there by Jack's car, but they're not bickering. They're on the ground.

They're on the ground, and from what Bozer can see from this angle, Mac is slumped over in Jack's arms, and as he's processing this information, he's already taking his first frightened step towards the door. Then, something stops him. While they're on the ground, and that very fact brings to mind scenarios where Mac has abruptly passed out, been shot, stabbed, had any number of mortal injuries inflicted on his body, the part of what Bozer is seeing that stops him is Jack. He looks, from a distance at least, calm. Jack isn't on his phone, or shouting for help, or hauling Mac's bleeding body up into the car and screeching off to the nearest emergency room.

Focusing on this, and the reality that if something were seriously, dangerously wrong with Mac, there's no way Jack would just be sitting there with him, is what allows Bozer to back slowly off the panic he'd crashed into when he'd first seen them out there. As the instant jolt of frozen fear eases and passes, a different kind of unease rises and takes its place.

On one hand, this is a good thing - it hasn't slipped Bozer's attention, the way Mac has been keeping Jack literally at arm's length as well as figuratively. It's a contradiction that makes Bozer's heart hurt to see, the way Mac reacts to being touched like he's a plant that hasn't seen sunshine in a decade while simultaneously turning himself away from it, refusing to let any but a sparse few actually touch him. Most of the time, Bozer can at least understand why - he's known James MacGyver for a very long time, and he's not what could be described as an affectionate man, nor encouraging of such behavior in his son.

But with Jack… Bozer's seen how he's been reaching out, over and over proving himself someone who is steady, consistent, worthy of their trust. This is someone safe, someone dedicated to _proving_ that he's safe, and it's good to see Mac finally letting himself believe that. Once moving past the relief that not only is Jack holding Mac, but Mac is _letting him,_ the question of what precipitated this crashes abruptly into Bozer's brain, cutting off any relief or warmth he feels at the scene outside. Because for this to be happening, for them to be huddled on the ground together like this, for Mac to cast aside image and the illusion of not needing anyone and _definitely_ not needing Jack…

Bozer looks away. He drops the curtain and turns sharply away from the window. This moment, what's happening outside between Mac and Jack, he knows that no one else was meant to see it, and to stand there watching it feels wrong and invasive. He paces down the hallway, back towards his own room, then pivots when he runs out of floor and starts walking again, back towards the kitchen. Over and over he walks, feeling like he must be wearing some sort of physical groove in the floor by now, waiting for Mac to come inside. Bracing for what kind of state he's going to be in when he does.

When the door finally eases open, stopping Bozer in his tracks, he doesn't know how long it's been and he deliberately avoids checking the time to see. Mac and Jack enter together, and Bozer is surprised to note that when they do, they haven't yet broken contact. As Jack turns to close the door behind them, Mac is still tucked under his arm and pressed hard against his side, one of his hands clutching onto a fistful of his jacket. It's when they turn back around, moving almost as one entity, that Bozer catches his first real glimpse of his roommate's face, and it feels like dry ice in his lungs, cold and breathless.

Mac has never been able to hide it when he cries. His emotional state paints itself across his face, has done since he was a child, and Bozer knows it's gotten him in trouble with James, who seems to have very specific opinions about what Mac should be feeling and when, taking great personal umbrage when these expectations aren't met. Right now is no exception. And so Bozer can tell, just by looking at him, the reddened eyes and flushed cheeks, the tremor still occasionally shivering through his jaw and his bottom lip, that Mac hasn't just been crying. He's been sobbing, hard enough that it's sapped the energy clean out of him, leaving him exhausted and too shattered to stop himself from hanging on to whatever strength he can find - in this case, Jack.

"Hey," Bozer says, around a dry throat, trying to sound normal. Years of practice has by now taught him that the worst thing you can do when Mac is upset is draw attention to it. You've just got to act like everything is normal, and deal with things as calmly and nonchalantly as possible. Only very rarely will he allow any pain he's experiencing to be openly acknowledged without shutting down completely, and he seems way too far gone to risk pushing right now.

"Hey," Jack says back, speaking for both of them. Mac doesn't say anything at all, his adams apple visibly bobbing as he swallows hard.

Looking between the two of them, Bozer makes a quick decision. He pushes down the instant fear he feels prickling up and down his spine at the thought of something that could've made Mac _that_ upset, reassures himself with the knowledge that at least he looks like he isn't physically damaged this time, and straightens out his shoulders.

"Okay," sighs Bozer, taking a slight step towards Mac and making it clear through body language and eye contact that he's talking to his roommate directly, "why don't you go ahead and go get ready for bed, it's getting late and it looks like you guys have had a long day. Go on and head to my room when you're ready, I'll be in in a minute."

Mac is either comfortable enough with Jack's presence or too worn out to care that there was someone else standing there when Bozer suggested, for all intents and purposes, a sleepover, and he nods. For his part, if Jack is surprised, it doesn't show at all on his face, not so much as a twitch to betray what he thinks of that arrangement.

"Alright," Mac agrees, the first word he's spoken since he and Jack came inside, and the sound of it makes Bozer wince. The word splinters between syllables, coming out cracked and gravel-rough from a throat that's obviously painfully raw. He moves with a deep, bone-tired slowness as he straightens up, pulling away from Jack with a reluctance Bozer might not have noticed if he wasn't paying such close attention.

Before he can turn and head down the hall, Mac stops. He looks at Jack and opens his mouth like he's going to say something, only for his voice to seemingly fail him, a soft, almost whined breath coming from his chest, followed by silence.

"It's okay," is what Jack says in response, and his slight smile, worried around the edges, is enough to stop whatever Mac had been trying to come up with. "You heard the man. Get some rest, kid." He reaches up to first clasp Mac's shoulder, then squeeze the side of his neck, before turning his own body to encourage Mac down the hall, guiding him along the way with a gentle push so feather light it barely wrinkles the back of his shirt.

They both stand there and watch him go together, until Mac's disappeared down the end of the hall and, echoing through from elsewhere in the house, water starts running. Only then, with Mac safely out of both eyesight and earshot, does Bozer round on Jack and demand, in a slightly hushed tone, "What the _hell,_ Jack? He looked like- He looked- What the _hell?"_

Jack sighs, a sound that belongs to a man much older and more tired than he, and runs a hand down his face. It's interesting to watch, in a halfway-infuriating sort of sense, the way the gears in Jack's brain visibly turn, sorting through what happened to try and locate a version of it he could tell Bozer without disclosing information he can't give up.

"Did you ever meet Alfred Peña?"

It's just about the last name Bozer would've expected to come up, and he feels his heart plummeting through the floor when Jack says it. Unable to bring himself to speak, Bozer just nods. Mac's first security detail had been a good man who Bozer liked quite a lot and had mourned deeply when he died. If whatever happened today that put Mac in that kind of state had something to do with Al… Knowing he never got the full story of what had happened there does not have Bozer feeling extremely confident about the rest of this conversation.

"The same… man," Jack says, in a slow, careful voice that means he's picking his words like he's sorting through shards of glass to find pieces that are safe to touch, "that is the reason he died was the reason for what we were doing today." That's not it. It'd be enough, that's for certain, but that's not where it ends, and Bozer is too heartsick and frustrated with worry to let it drop there.

"And?" he challenges, then waits. Watches as, again, Jack's mind mulls over how much to say and how much not to say, what to twist and what can remain as it is.

"We had a close call," is what he eventually lands on. Then, Jack winces, and amends the statement. "I did, really. _I_ had a close call. And Mac was… It shook him, y'know. Pretty bad."

In the seconds after Jack says, not in so many words but clear enough that Bozer understands perfectly, that he'd almost died today, in front of Mac, two things come one after the other into Bozer's suddenly empty brain. He thinks about Mac, the day he'd come home from that job that had taken him somewhere he'd only say had been very, very cold, and told Bozer that they'd nearly lost Jack. There had been a devastated grief on his face, left over from a terrible loss that only barely hadn't happened, and Bozer can still hear the edge in his voice when Mac had admitted, quiet as anything, that he didn't know what he'd do if Jack died.

In the immediate aftermath of hearing that this has happened once again, Bozer thinks about that day, and he thinks about pie crust.

Mac had passed out cold on the couch, midway through some action movie both Bozer and Jack had seen a collective dozen or so times. Jack had eyed him where he lay, crumpled over against the far left armrest, and wondered out loud if he ought to wake him up, or just try to move him to a more comfortable place to sleep. From the kitchen, Bozer had advised in a hushed voice not to, that it was better to just let him keep sleeping these days. So, instead of doing anything about Mac's less than ideal napping spot, Jack had turned the movie down a few notches, gotten up, and walked over into the kitchen.

For the better part of half an hour, Bozer had been trying and failing to make a fruit pie. Or, rather, in that specific moment, trying and failing to make a crust that would, hopefully at some point, contain a fruit pie. Nothing about it had been turning out, though, and since the pie was the one he was planning to make for his mother's birthday, he was determined to get the recipe right in a trial run before he made the real thing.

Seeing that he was having something of a difficult time, and upon finding out why that was, Jack had offered his family recipe, one his own mother had patiently taught him standing at the kitchen counter in his childhood home in Texas. He and Bozer had then made the crust together, while Mac slept like a rock in the other room, quietly laughing and enjoying each other's company. It was the first time they'd really done anything together without Mac's direct participation, and it was proof that they had more in common than a mutual investment in the survival and wellbeing of a friend. It was the first time Bozer had directly thought of Jack himself as a friend, rather than just Mac's security detail, the man tasked with keeping his roommate alive.

Mac's stricken face and a pie crust. That's what Bozer thinks of when he hears that today, once again, Jack and death had brushed shoulders.

"Shook him," Bozer repeats, and his voice sounds a little distant. He can still hear the running water, somewhere back behind him, white noise that seems louder than before. The tips of his fingers are tingling on the edge of numb, and there's a tightness in his chest he's grown all too familiar with, when Mac comes home with a limp he thinks he's hiding, withdrawn and barely talking for days. "Right."

They regard each other there in the front hallway, a novel's worth of words unsaid between them, and for a second, just a _second,_ Bozer is absolutely sure Jack is about to tell him everything. And, for the space of that second, Bozer is sure he's about to ask. If he asks right now, Jack is going to tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help him God. And maybe what stops him is cowardice. Maybe it's not _wanting_ to know the truth for fear of what shape it's going to take. Maybe it's spite, wanting Mac to have to own up to everything himself. But regardless of what the reason is for his hesitation, the moment passes, and Bozer doesn't ask.

Instead, he just shakes his head, glancing back down the hall towards where Mac had disappeared to. Tonight, they'll sleep side by side, he and Mac, in Bozer's bed, the steady rise and fall of his chest enough to quell Bozer's fear for the time being at least. It would be easy to assume this ritual of theirs, the way they'll sometimes still end a difficult, terrible day close enough to hear a beloved friend's steady, healthy breathing, is mainly for Mac's benefit. That Bozer tolerates this in deference to his roommate's capital-I Issues, far outgrown needing such comfort himself. That assumption would be wrong. Just as often it's Bozer's heart that beats too loud too fast, locked in a living nightmare of bruises and long silences and imagined funerals, and today is no exception.

With a deep, shoulder-heaving breath, Bozer turns back around to face Jack and tries to put the thought of the man's death out of his mind. The sound of the shower has shut abruptly off, the water silenced after a few brief minutes. Bozer feels suddenly exhausted himself, ready to fall into bed and sleep for a year, hopefully to wake up in a world where the people he cares about are safer, or at least one where he understands the shape and nature of the threat. He starts to thank Jack for bringing Mac home, tell him he's glad everyone made it out okay, and wish him a goodnight, when something stops him.

Jack seems like he'd been about to start leaving himself, angled towards the front door with his hand lifted towards it, but stopped before he could take a step. His face is troubled and hesitant, and Bozer would imagine his own looks much the same just then. When the offer falls out of his mouth, he's not entirely sure where it came from or why, just that he's monumentally glad Jack is alright, and knows that things are likely to be difficult for Mac tonight.

"Look, do you want to stay?"

At first, Jack is sure he's misheard. Bozer's standing there in the hall of his and Mac's house, looking like he's aged ten years from the happy-go-lucky kid Jack's gotten to know, looking like he'd been about to wish Jack a goodnight, only to say something completely different.

"Sorry?" Jack says, instead of answering the question.

"I just mean…" Bozer looks a little embarrassed, then shakes his head, and the look vanishes, replaced by something definite and a little stubborn. "No, that's exactly what I meant. Tonight's gonna suck for all of us, I think, and maybe we'd all feel a little better if you were here. So, just- if you don't want to you don't have to, but if you do, I think you should stay."

And so Jack stays.

He settles on the couch in the living room, a pillow tossed on one end and a spare blanket pulled from a hall closet set on top of it. Even after Bozer's disappeared into his room, Jack doesn't settle down and try to sleep, not yet. Instead, he sits on the couch and looks out through the living room window into the dark of the night, settled heavy over the back porch. The city glitters somewhere in the distance, and Jack wonders about Senator Roger Delaney, the man whose life Mac saved for a second time that day.

Somewhere out there, that man has gone home to his family, probably frightened and more than a little shaken, but alive and well. And here in this house, Jack himself is alive and well, though admittedly also frightened and shaken by the whole thing. Tomorrow likely holds a visit to Jack Senior's grave, that's for sure. Trying to avoid ruminating too extensively on the portion of the day where he'd nearly been blown sky high, Jack goes through a series of breathing exercises he'd learned after he'd been discharged. He closes his eyes and counts inhales and exhales, feeling his body slow and calm. He's okay. Mac is okay. Everybody got out of today okay.

_Mac, crumpled against his chest, sobbing violently in his arms until he was sure the kid was going to make himself sick, the look on his face when he'd thought Jack was pushing him away, guilty and embarrassed and hurt._

Alright, so maybe 'okay' might be pushing it a bit. But they're all still alive, and that means there's still hope for 'okay', and, Jack would argue, there's a strong case to be made for 'good'.

He's been sitting there for a while, calming his own nervous system and still somewhat reeling from the shock of having Mac break down like that in the driveway, clinging to him after barely allowing Jack to touch him for months on end, when the light knock sounds at the door. A glance to the clock tells him it's far past when anyone should conceivably be visiting other people, and Jack stands up slowly. Experience and instinct sends his hand into his pocket, fishing out a knife and setting his thumb on the spring-release trigger that will extend the blade.

The knife goes tucked back into Jack's pocket immediately when he sees who's standing there on the porch, backlit by the pale white light of the street lamp up by the sidewalk. Riley doesn't acknowledge him or betray any amount of surprise that the person who'd answered Mac and Bozer's front door was neither of the two of them, instead just brushing straight past Jack and into the house. He just stands there and blinks for a moment, baffled, still holding the door open, then shakes his head and follows her into the living room.

There's a shoulder bag set on the floor by the couch, which is where Riley has seen fit to park herself, and she's got her jaw set in a line that means she's angry, or upset, or maybe both. She looks like she's dressed for bed, wearing the kind of sweatpants she's always favored as pajamas and a grey and orange sweatshirt reading 'CALTECH' across the front in bright, aggressive lettering. Jack recognizes it as the one she'd borrowed from Mac that day in the front yard, when Bozer had brought the foam swords from his friend's play and the three of them had spent an evening acting their age for once while Jack watched, a light, proud feeling in his chest. Evidently, 'borrowed' wasn't quite the right word, as it seems to have never made it back to its original owner.

"So…" Jack says eventually, sitting down on the opposite end of the couch from the one Riley has claimed for herself. The rest of the question asks itself and he lets it, not saying anything in favor of letting her take the lead.

Shrugging one shoulder, Riley says dismissively, "Well, I went to your apartment first, and you weren't there, so I came here next." _What of it?_ her expression challenges, and Jack holds his hands up in the universal, silent message of surrender. This is not the time to interrogate her motives for looking for him, or assuming this is where he'd be, or point out that she has a perfectly functioning cell-phone he knows for a fact she goes nowhere without and keeps charged at all times.

Speaking of cell-phones, Jack slides his out of his pocket, figuring it's probably a good idea to let Bozer know, if he's still awake at this point, that there's someone else in his house. He sends a quick text, alerting the one likely conscious resident of the house that they have a second visitor with them. Bozer shuffles out of his room a few moments later, blinking sleep from his eyes and giving Riley a little wave.

"Can have Mac's room if you want, he's with me tonight anyway," he tells her, voice slowed and fuzzy the way a person tends to sound when they'd been nearly asleep. He doesn't seem at all surprised to see her there and already anticipates that they're going to have another overnight guest, if the unprompted offer is anything to go by. She acknowledges him with a nod, and without another word, Bozer returns to his room, stumbling slightly across the floor with heavy, tired steps.

Riley doesn't get up and head off to bed herself, not just yet. Instead she studies Jack for a minute, expression unreadable, and then reaches down into the bag she brought with her. It's the same game she and Mac had played together earlier that same endless, dragging day. She sets the Mancala board on the coffee table then pauses, her hand hesitating over the felt bag of flattened marbles.

"Tired?" she asks, and Jack reads around the one-word question into everything else she hadn't asked.

"Nope," he tells her, and she looks away, beginning to set up the board.

They begin in an odd, slightly tense silence, the kind that bends and gives like an ancient dam, holding back water that will burst at any moment. Jack doesn't have to wait long for Riley to start talking. She doesn't look at him when she does, instead focused on distributing the marbles out into the pots past the one she'd selected.

"Matty drove me home, and when she dropped me off, she gave me something."

"Oh?" Jack tries to keep his voice light, allowing her to set her own pace with what she's telling him. He takes his turn, scooping an overflowing pot into his hand, reaching down to capture one wayward piece that's fallen onto the floor. As he's straightening up, she continues.

"Yeah. Boxes of after action reports. There's a lot of yours and Mac's, but there's older ones too. It's gotta be a couple hundred pages, easily. She wants me to go through them, start documenting things, so that when she takes it to the Oversight board she'll have something to show them other than instincts and some weird things she's seen."

It's a big step. If Matty's asking Riley to start documenting evidence of James's misconduct like this, combing back through reports that were probably classified to the gills, she must have been deadly serious when she'd told Jack about escalating the investigation. And her timeline is a lot more concrete than he'd thought it was when they'd talked before Amsterdam, before the Ghost, before the hazy dust storm of the last few days.

"Wow," is all Jack can find to say. It's useless and inadequate, but she nods, the hint of a smile quirking up the edge of her lips.

"Yeah," Riley agrees, voice soft and tired. "Wow is right." She reaches out and chooses her next pot, earning herself a second turn when the last marble lands in her end of the board.

They play round after round of the simple game, the only sound in the dimly lit living room the gentle clack of rounded marbles in the polished grooves carved into the board. Jack doesn't keep score of who wins how many times, nor does he push to keep talking about James or the investigation, content to sit here and spend time with her. The night wears on late until Jack can feel his eyelids growing heavy, see the slow in Riley's hand when she reaches over to scoop a handful of marbles out of her chosen dish. They finish through that game and then she stands, stretching just like she had when she was a kid, face scrunched up in a way she'd always hated when Jack described as 'cute'.

Wordlessly, Riley starts heading for Mac's room, and Jack sits up on the couch. He snags the pillow and straightens it at one end, beginning to spread the blanket out as well when something stops him. Riley's footsteps have returned, come to a stop just behind him on the couch, and now her arms are around his neck. He can feel her breathing, her hair tickling the side of his face, and it's a long pause before she speaks.

"I'm really, _really_ glad you're okay," Riley tells him, and before he can answer her, she's gone, nothing left behind but the phantom feeling of her arms around him and the intense sincerity of her voice echoing in his ears. If there had been any question before, there isn't one now, that this visit had been about far, far more than updating Jack on the progress of their underground inquiry with matty.

Jack has to admit he's feeling pretty special, by now. Both of his kids have now hugged him today, both of them stopping suddenly behind him and throwing their arms around him when he wasn't expecting it. All in all, he's going to call this one a good day. Sure he nearly died, and that part hadn't been so great, but Mac had hugged him without prompting, and Riley had come to find him, just to prove to herself he was still okay. It's enough to make a man feel pretty loved, and it's with this feeling, heavy and warm in his chest, that he lays down and closes his eyes, falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.


	32. A Little Bit Of Tender Mercy

_please forgive me for any practical or medical ridiculousness in this chapter, it is bound to exist, as i did minimal research and i'm basically here for a good time tbh. which means, naturally, mac and jack are about to have a bad time. enjoy, guys!_

_(chapter title from the mountain goats song 'absolute lithops effect')_

_(chapter warnings: description of serious injury, field medicine, adverse reaction to medication. brief use of needles.)_

* * *

Jack can't breathe. His heart is thundering in his throat and he can't breathe around thick, relentless, choking fear, a kind of fear he's never felt before - just as he was starting to think he'd learned all the types of fear there were in the world, with this partnership. This is not the first time someone has hurt Mac on a mission. This is, however, the first time someone has _taken_ him. One second they'd been about to head to the exfil point to rendezvous with their extraction team, and the next Jack was catching his last glimpse of Mac's wide, startled eyes, moments before the bag was pulled over his head and the van's doors closed around him. And just like that, he's gone.

The call from the exfil team comes just at the moment that Jack, running as fast as he can down the street, loses sight of the van. He talks over the man on the other end immediately when he accepts the call, voice too loud and too fast as he tells exfil team Sierra November's second in command, Vincent Stone, what's happened. Vincent tells him they're on their way, the call ends, and before Jack has hardly had time to process what's happening, he and three of the four members of Sierra November are scouring the city for any sign of Mac.

(And if exfil isn't technically supposed to assist field agents on missions, Jack isn't going to be the one to point it out. Besides, the mission was over before that van pulled up so, if anyone felt like splitting hairs about it, technically the abduction had taken place during exfiltration.)

It's only been an hour, but Jack feels like he's losing his mind. He can't shake the image of Mac's face, too surprised to be scared yet, then hidden by the hood. Riley's on the SAT-phone from their mission base, safe away from the action on this one, Jack's driving as fast as he can towards the last ping from Mac's cell, while the exfil team has left one person with the plane and sent the other three out to help. It's not a big city, but it feels massive to Jack now, when somewhere down those unfamiliar streets, there's a young man he is responsible for, having god knows what done to him god knows where.

This isn't supposed to happen. Jack is supposed to be better than this, and it's one thing for there to be a firefight or an ambush, something they can fight their way out of, something he can put himself in front of Mac doing to shield him from the worst of it, but now he's just… He's just gone. Jack can't protect him, doesn't even know what Mac needs protecting _from_ right now, if someone is beating him, interrogating him, if he might be face-down in an alley somewhere, a bullet in his brilliant head.

But that's a path down which Jack cannot allow himself to go, because if he does, he really _will_ panic, and panic isn't going to find Mac. Panic isn't going to get him home in one piece. So Jack grits his teeth and swings the car around another corner, towards the location Riley had pinged him to.

Mac isn't there. Jack sweeps the building and heads back out to his car, heart thudding so hard he can feel it in his chest, his throat, his hands around the steering wheel. Though he knows it's not true, that if there hadn't been enough time for Jack to draw his weapon there certainly wouldn't have been time for Mac to defend himself, there's a part of Jack that has to wonder if this is his fault. If maybe, if he hadn't talked Mac out of carrying that gun he'd obviously hated so much, then there might have been a chance that the abduction would have been unsuccessful. Jack's been doing this for long enough that he knows it isn't true as sure as he knows the color of the sky and the feel of the grass at his father's grave, but he's a different man now than he's been for the majority of the last decade-odd of his career. There's something new in him, something irrational and frightened, jumpy and prone to worst-case scenarios, and it's that part that's screaming at him now, _you did this, you practically handed your boy to them defenseless and disarmed. _

'You've got me,' he had said, down there in the shooting range, used as evidence that the gun Mac carried like it was a death sentence could be cast away and left behind. Fat lot of good having Jack had done Mac just now. It had still happened. He's still gone.

Jack is never afforded the chance to make up for this grievous failure. He gets the call while he's in the car, one of the exfil agents helping him search alerting him that they have Mac, he's alive, and they're barrelling towards the original meeting location as fast as possible. Routing himself swiftly in the same direction, Jack doesn't even have to ask before the answer to his question is provided in the rushed, strained voice of Thomas King, Sierra November's most junior operative. Thomas tells him that he and his partner, they hadn't even really found Mac themselves - Mac had found them, having broke himself out of the warehouse his captors had taken him to and made an instant beeline for where he knew they were supposed to meet Sierra for take-off.

Before Jack can demand that Thomas put Mac on the phone, the call is ended, and Jack is left to drive alone to the location of their transport plane. He updates Riley on the way and tries to sound as reassuring as possible while also not betraying exactly how little he knows about Mac's condition. The rest of the drive passes in a blur, and Jack leaves the car where he parks it, door hanging open as he runs for the plane.

An hour and a half. In all, the entire nightmare lasts a crisp ninety minutes, less than the run time of most Hollywood movies, but to Jack, it felt like days. Well, no, that's not entirely right. To Jack, it's not over yet, not completely. Because they may have Mac with them again, the small military transport plane may be streaking across the sky under the guidance of Sierra's second in command, but something is still very, very wrong.

With concerned suspicion, Jack watches Mac. He's huddled by the far wall of the interior bay of the transport plane, wedged between two seats. They'd all strapped in for takeoff, but as soon as it was safe, Mac had been up and out of the seat, moving unnaturally. With the chaos and the rush and then takeoff, Jack hasn't been able to get a good look at him yet, and neither has Sierra's team lead, the person arguably the most comprehensively medically trained on this plane right now. Exfil teams all go through rigorous medical training, by necessity, and Jack happens to know that this particular team lead, Lucia Sosa, has been through more than most. They exchange a glance, and Jack is up, heading over towards his partner.

"Mac?" he says, in an unsuccessful bid to get his attention. There's no response, Mac remaining pressed against the rigging rope stretched out over the wall. He's turned sharply towards it, facing away from Jack, like he's guarding the far side of his body. Jack steps closer, slowly closing the space separating them, and says again, louder, "Mac?"

The moment Jack gets close enough to hear, over the sound of the plane's engines, the absolutely gutting noises escaping Mac's shallowly heaving chest, everything about what they thought had happened, the miraculously clean getaway they thought they'd made, crumbles to dust. The reality crashes into him he as Mac's hand shoots out and grabs onto the side of his jacket, fingers curling white-knuckled over leather while his knees almost give out under him. Jack tries to help, to catch him and shift him over to the seats, but Mac lets out a frantic, wordless noise, pulling his left side as far away from Jack's reaching grip as possible, while maintaining the hold now keeping him upright.

"Lucia!" Jack's voice rises to a near yell as he calls for Sierra November's team lead. That panic he'd felt earlier, the fear that had risen high in his lungs and trying to claw its way straight out of him, is back, beginning to build up once more. "Get over here, he's hurt."

Hurt might be understating things. It's obvious, now that Jack is close enough, hands hovering over his partner's body, unsure if there's anywhere it's safe to touch him, that Mac is in so much pain he can't speak. His eyes are narrowed so far they're nearly closed, breathing in thin whistling gasps through clenched teeth. There's no blood Jack can see, at least until he looks down at the hand still holding onto his jacket like Mac's going to collapse without that anchor point. There's a circle around his wrist, reddened, purpling marks pressed harshly into his skin as deep bruising is beginning to form, interspersed with a few places where the damage has broken through, blood smeared up his forearm where it had previously been hidden by his sleeve.

When Jack leans over to try and get a look at his left side, where the damage is obviously concentrated judging by Mac's body language, he gets the same response as when he'd tried to catch the kid, Mac jerking back and making a panicked, formless sound. If it had been a word, it might have been 'don't'.

"Okay, okay," Jack tries to soothe, risking taking ahold of the arm still reached out and holding onto him, supporting Mac by the bicep and shoulder. This seems to be acceptable, as no further distress is indicated, and Jack says a second time, more urgently, "Lucia, please!"

"What's going on?" Lucia asks as she approaches, plastic snaps sounding as she opens what's presumably a highly well-stocked first-aid kit.

"Was he like this in the car?" Jack snaps without looking over his shoulder, bypassing her question with one of his own. He can't tear his eyes off his partner, still trying to assess what the hell could possibly be wrong with him. There's a flash of silver from where his left arm is blocked by his body, shielded between Mac's torso and the wall of the plane, and the math starts doing itself in Jack's head. The damage to his right wrist, the fact that the pain seems to be concentrated around his left arm, the silver. Handcuffs. There's still a pair of handcuffs, hanging off Mac's blocked wrist.

"No," Lucia says, her own voice clipped and intent, seeming to take no umbrage at his tone. "Thomas said he seemed rattled and out of breath but mostly okay. But adrenaline could've blocked the worst of it until now, he could've hid it or not even noticed himself. Agent MacGyver, can you hear me? I need to look at your arm, can you-"

"No!"

It's the first coherent sound Mac has made since the plane took off, one half-crazed word in response to Lucia reaching out for him, towards his injured arm. The look on his face reminds Jack of an animal caught in a trap, wounded, out of its mind with pain and fear. It doesn't escape Jack's notice that, when Mac had tried to scramble away this time, he'd ended up further behind Jack, now squeezed as far as possible between Jack and the nearest seat. With this shift, Jack is now between him and Lucia, who Mac may not even have the presence of mind to recognize right now. With the dramatically increased proximity, Jack can feel the tension in his body, the way Mac is shaking, trembling from head to toe.

"It's okay," Jack tells him, feels the woeful inadequacy of the words even as they leave his mouth. "It's Lucia Sosa, exfil Sierra November's lead, remember? We know her. We can trust her. She's gotta take a look at your arm there, buddy, we don't know how bad you're hurt."

"I ca-" It's an attempt at actual speech, cut off midway by a quick gasp of breath, Mac closing his eyes hard and gritting his teeth to ride out the wave of agony that's overtaken him, short-circuiting anything else. When it passes, he tries again, knuckles pressed into Jack's side where he's still holding on, "Can't- Ca-an't- Jack, I-"

It's almost as helpless a feeling to stand here watching this, unable to do anything about it, unable to even see what there needs to be something done _about,_ as it had been during those ninety minutes Mac had been missing. Now, Jack does look, glancing over to Lucia, searching for any kind of guidance on what to do next, because he's found himself out of options.

"What are you doing?" he asks, when he sees her knelt down on the floor, kit open on the seat in front of her. She's rifling through a set of little glass bottles, syringe in its sterile packaging already set out.

"Painkiller, heavy duty. Nobody but you is going to get close enough to touch him, and I don't think it's your medical skills you want evaluating your partner right now, am I correct on that?" When Jack nods, Lucia does too. "So we're going to have to medicate him beforehand if we want to do anything about this, and we're going to have to, if we don't want to risk permanent damage. I can't even assess him like this. Do you understand?" Another nod from him, and she tells him, "Good. Now try and make sure he does. I'm not coming at an even semi-conscious trained field agent with a needle if he doesn't know what's going on."

Seeing her point, Jack turns his attention back to Mac and attempts to explain what needs to happen. It's clear that Mac is at least somewhat processing what he's saying, and when he gets to the words 'pain medication', he shakes his head so harshly that shaggy blond hair brushes Jack's cheek.

"No, I can, c'n-"

"Mac we have to, Lucia has to check out your arm, we need to know how bad it is."

Mac shakes his head again, and Jack is about to keep arguing when he starts talking, actually talking in real words it's obviously taking everything out of him to speak.

"Only- Only hurts-" The sentence is coming in short, cut-off bursts, forced out on panting breaths, mostly air and not a lot of sound. Jack does his best not to interrupt, to give Mac the space he needs to get out whatever he's trying to say in the choppy, barely comprehensible speech that's all the pain has left him with. "Be-Because I can't- Cal-lm- Down."

Okay, he must be really out of his mind, because that doesn't make a lick of sense at all, and nothing else follows it.

"What are you saying, Mac?" Jack asks, hating drawing this out any longer than necessary, but knowing at the same time that he's not going to drug Mac by force, not when there's the option of talking him around to the idea.

"It only- H-hurts-" Mac tries again, a little stronger this time. The agony, pulsing through him in waves, must be at an ebb, because he's able to get it out with more clarity and fewer pauses. "'Cause I'm pa… I'm panicking. 'F I calm- Calm down, it'll-" A longer pause, deep breaths in through Mac's nose, out through gritted teeth, accompanied by a faint, suppressed keen. "It'll be better. Jus' gotta, gotta _calm down."_

Now _that_ Jack understands, and it is maybe the biggest crock of horse-shit he has ever heard in his life. He's got a pretty damn good idea who he has to thank for it, too, but right now fantasies of breaking James MacGyver's arm and telling him it'll feel better if he just _calms down_ while denying him pain medication have to take a backseat to caring for Mac. He wants to yell, to get angry, to say 'hell no it doesn't hurt because you're panicking, it hurts because someone _hurt you,_ because your arm is all messed up and your body's full of nerves that are supposed to _tell you_ when something is wrong and no amount of calm down is gonna change that'. But that's not going to help, in fact yelling at Mac is maybe the worst thing he could do at present, so Jack tries a different tactic.

"You're a science whiz, right?" The question takes Mac by surprise, Jack can see that it does, and he tilts his head to the side. He's breathing more heavily again, and Jack would bet the agony is rebuilding, leaving him with a very short window to get his point across before Mac is going to be too out of it to talk to again. "So you know some stuff about nerves and receptors and brains and whatever. So you know that's bullshit. We'll talk about the bullshit later, don't think for a second we won't, kid, but right now, please, _please_ just listen to the part of you that knows that's junk science and let Lucia help you."

There's a long, stiff silence broken only by the plane's engines whirring and Mac's labored, damp breathing. His eyes, looking searchingly at Jack, are hooded and fogged as things most definitely creep worse and worse, and finally, _finally_ he nods.

"You're good to go," Jack tells Lucia, who is, when he looks over, fiddling with some kind of touch-screen tablet. "Can you play with that later, we've got-"

"To run the drug I'm about to inject your partner with through our system against his DXS medical personnel file so we can be sure it's not going to kill him, Agent Dalton." Her voice is cool and calm, completely focused on selecting something on the screen, then scrolling through the next option, down a list of names to pick _FIELD AGENT - MACGYVER, A._ out of it. The device thinks for a second, then throws up a grey box, fading out the rest of the screen. The text is big enough Jack can read it, _CLEARED FOR USE. _With the system's go-ahead, Lucia makes quick work of administering the drugs she's assembled, three in all.

With each prick of the needle, Mac momentarily loses what amount of control he's been able to retain over his reactions, and he flinches, muted whines escaping through tightly pursed lips. Once she's done, Lucia backs away, allowing Mac to essentially hide from the rest of them behind Jack while they wait for the medications to take effect. Jack keeps his hold on Mac's good arm with one hand, reaching out with the other to clasp the back of his neck. His grip is firm, hopefully applying enough pressure to help Mac feel grounded and safe but not trapped.

Soon, but not nearly soon enough for Jack's liking, the noises Mac has been unable to hold in, muted humming and muffled whimpers he's too hurt to snuff out, quiet and fade. Jack feels the stranglehold on his own heart and lungs fade with it, easing somewhat as some of the rigid tension melts from Mac's body. The painkillers are taking effect. _Thank God,_ Jack thinks, at last able to help Mac to sit down, sitting beside him to support him as Lucia begins her exam. _Thank God, thank God. _

The verdict could be much worse, but it isn't good. Mac's left shoulder is dislocated, and so is his wrist, the handcuffs digging into swollen skin, bruised and torn under the unforgiving metal. It makes Jack feel sick, nearly whites out his vision with anger, but he forces himself to look anyway. This is what he's supposed to protect Mac from, and it's not like Mac was afforded the opportunity to look away. Why should Jack be allowed to? So he watches, jaw clenched so tight the muscle aches, holding Mac steady as Lucia gets about treating the injuries to the best of her ability. He's barely conscious at this point, and Jack is quietly grateful for this. Even when the cuffs are finally unlocked and pulled gingerly away from his damaged wrist, Mac doesn't really react.

The point at which Mac's shoulder is relocated under Lucia's careful handywork, braced with his back against Jack's chest and Jack's arms around him holding him still, and his only reaction is a barely half-hearted jerk against the hold and a high-pitched whine, is where Jack starts getting worried. He helps shift Mac forward as Lucia straps his arm to his chest, then allowing him to slump back against the older agent, mumbling something inaudible and pained sounding under his breath. It's a different kind of incoherency than before, and Jack knows pain medication can set people out of sorts, but something about this feels off.

"Lucia," Jack says over where Mac's head has fallen to rest against his collarbone. The feeling of Mac's weight completely resting in his arms, head low and heavy against his chest, it sparks a furnace in him, protective and fierce. It's the second time he's been afforded this privilege, been allowed to hold Mac like he's wanted to a hundred times over, but this feels different than it had on the pavement of the driveway outside the house. This time, it feels far less like something Mac has decided to do, to permit.

"What are you seeing, Jack?" the woman asks him, shrewd senses honed by years leading one of the best exfil teams in the business allowing her to pinpoint immediately that he's noticed something wrong.

"Something's not right," he tells her, gesturing with his chin down at the still, spaced out form in his arms. "This isn't right, did you sedate him?"

Frowning, Lucia resumes the seat on the opposite side of Mac, reaching out to tap his cheek and get his attention. Mac's eyes roam around the room, landing on her for a moment, he mumbles something else, and he's gone again. Gone where, Jack doesn't know.

"No," Lucia says shortly, sounding as unnerved as Jack feels, "I didn't. The meds I gave him are strong but not this strong." Her voice raises as she directs her words to Mac, saying, "Agent MacGyver, I need you to look at me, can you do that?"

This time, Mac tries to sit up, and about topples forward out of his seat, halted only by the twin sharp reflexes of Jack and Lucia, guiding him back into Jack's careful hold.

"Patti?" It's the first word Mac's said since given the drugs that's been halfway understandable, and then he does something really alarming. He giggles. Mac honest to God _giggles,_ and says, voice hazy and disoriented, "Nah, 's not Patti. M' dad fired her when he fired… He fired _eve-r-r-r-ybody._ Hi, Patti, y' not here."

If it weren't so unsettling, Jack would probably find it funny. But it is unsettling, quickly approaching frightening, because Mac is always so in control, so keenly aware of himself and his surroundings, and this shouldn't be happening. Jack can tell his suspicions were correct, that this reaction isn't right, from the look on Lucia's face. She returns to the kit and rummages around until she finds a pen light, coming back over to check Mac's eyes for something. Then she glances over her shoulder.

"Thomas," she says to her teammate, "I need you to pull up Agent MacGyver's DXS medical file in the system for me, please. Now."

The young man does as he's told, tapping around on the tablet looking at something, presumably Mac's file.

"What's going on?" Jack asks. He hates being left out of the loop under the best of circumstances, and having his partner half-conscious and out of his mind in his arms is far, far from the best of circumstances.

"I'm trying to figure that out," Lucia tells him then turns back and asks, "Thomas, can you read me the allergy and sensitivity section, please?"

"No, I can't. I mean I literally can't, boss, it's blank." There's a tense pause as Thomas scrolls, finger flicking across the screen. "The whole thing, it's blank. Got his name, Angus MacGyver, and a date of birth, but there's nothing else in here, we literally don't even have his blood type."

There's a ringing in Jack's ears, and Lucia swears quietly. She returns her attention to Mac, asks him a series of questions as she checks his pulse and gets a temperature read, working efficiently around Jack's hold on him without drawing attention to it. Her questions, when they get answers at all, don't elicit anything understandable from Mac, and eventually she sits back in her seat, looking tired and worried.

"I'm almost positive that he's having an adverse reaction to the medication," Lucia tells Jack, calmly and professionally. "It's not anaphylactic, his airway seems clear, and he doesn't seem to be in any danger, but he's obviously got some kind of allergy or at least a sensitivity to what we've given him. We'll get him straight to medical when we get back to base, but in the meantime, I don't want to try and give him anything else. I can't think of what could counteract this, but even if there was something we could try, I don't want to risk it given the issue with his file." Something changes in her face then, her expression hardening and her voice taking on an odd edge. "The issue with his file, which I'm sure you'll be getting to the bottom of and addressing before it can cause any more problems."

Mac shifts, mumbling something unintelligible, and Jack's grip on him tightens fractionally. He nods once, mouth set in a grim line, and tells her, "Yeah. I sure will be." Because something like that, it can't be an accident. And while Jack doesn't think James would deliberately place his son's life in danger for the hell of it, he's also not sure the man would be above endangering it for what he convinced himself was a good reason. The question is what kind of reason would be good enough for James to scrub his son's medical file, leaving them without vital information necessary to ensure his safety.

Since Mac was too out of it, first with pain and then thanks to the adverse reaction to the drugs, they weren't able to get any answers out of him as to what actually happened to injure him so badly. They get the footage from Riley, back home, hacked out of a surveillance camera left behind by whatever company still owned the disused warehouse. Jack is nearly sick watching it, the moment that Mac, mid-escape and still cuffed, is nearly caught, rough hands sending him down and over a low ledge and onto the ground below. It's a miracle he'd avoided bouncing his head off the concrete floor - it would've meant a concussion at the very least, if not a cracked skull - but his shoulder had consequently taken the brunt of the impact. There's no sound attached to the video, but Jack can _see_ it when Mac screams.

Unable to stand it any longer, he closes out of the video and hands the tablet it was played on back to Matty. She accepts it without a word, and they both look at the door to medical, the one behind which Mac is currently being x-rayed, just in case either of the dislocations came with any broken bones. Riley's sitting down on a bench by the wall, unwilling to force herself to watch the footage again. Jack can't say he blames her. He scrubs a hand over his face and tries not to sigh too audibly.

"The Director's ordered his assistant to take Mac to a safe-house when he's cleared by medical." Just when Jack was thinking this day couldn't possibly get worse, Matty says that.

"What?" he asks, hoping he's just heard wrong. Of course, he's got no such luck.

"Says with the reaction to the pain meds he's in no condition to lie to his roommate and it's too much a risk he'll blow his cover. So he told Warren to take Mac to a safe-house as soon as he's cleared, and send someone in to check on him every couple hours."

Matty's barely finished her sentence before Jack is shaking his head, responding, "Screw that, absolutely not. Kid's coming home with me, no way in hell I'm letting that man throw him in some random-ass empty safe-house _alone_ when he got _kidnapped,_ battered, and is now off his ass on painkillers he can't tolerate. He needs to be somewhere _actually_ safe, with someone who will take care of him, and so I'll be taking him home and I'd like to see someone try and stop me." He has to admit the idea of a safe-house is just barely preferable to the idea of sending Mac home with James himself, but just barely. Either way, it's not happening.

"I know." Matty's got one eyebrow raised at him, and if it had been less of a godawful day from start to finish, Jack might've felt embarrassed for the strength of his reaction. "That's why I told Warren I'd take care of it myself. Soon as medical releases him, you're good to take him home."

With that firmly understood, Jack feels the fight drain out of him. He's suddenly and brutally exhausted, walking a few short steps to sit down next to Riley. It's a sign of exactly how hard she's silently taking this too that, when he does, she shifts closer, pressing slightly into his side. Matty stays standing, but moves to the opposite side of the hallway, leaning back into the wall and folding her arms. They're alone there, the three of them, and it's noticing this that prompts Jack to speak, in a low, serious voice.

"Someone wiped his file." When Matty narrows her eyes at him and Riley stiffens next to him, Jack elaborates. "It's why he had the reaction. Exfil runs medications against DXS personnel files before they give anybody anything in the field. They checked what they gave him, it came up all clear, but after he started acting weird, we checked, and his medical file is completely empty. Apparently not even his blood type is on there. I think the Director cleared his file, and I have no idea why."

"We'll add it to the list of things the Director does that we can't find a reason for," Riley says, angry but in a muted, tired kind of way.

"We'll get to the bottom of it all. Soon. I know we will," Matty tells them, the only one of the three of them who seems sure of that. Jack can't tell if it's because she is, or because she's gotten so good at her leadership poker face that not even he can see through it. Maybe, right now, he doesn't want to know. So, instead, he accepts it at face value, and hopes she's right.

Compared to how he'd been on the plane, when Mac is released into Jack's care, he's doing much better. He's no longer giggling at random, and he doesn't require a wheelchair to get him to Jack's car, which is an improvement, but things are far from normal. There's a spaced out look on his face, and he leans on Jack to stay upright, swaying as Jack buckles him into his seat.

"Goin' home?" Mac asks when Jack steps away, ready to close the door. He pauses, looks at the unfocused gaze Mac has locked on him, and nods.

"Yeah, buddy," he says softly, giving in to an impulse and reaching out to adjust the seatbelt over Mac's good shoulder for no reason other than to have an excuse to touch him again, gentle and protective. "I'm gonna take you home."

It's a long, slow process, but eventually Jack gets them both back to his own apartment, and Mac changed into borrowed clothes. Jack's hardly taller than Mac by an inch or two, but he's much broader, and he looks a little ridiculous in the big green hoodie Jack manages to get on him, one arm pulled through a sleeve with the other, still strapped to his chest, zipped into the body of the sweatshirt. The Dallas Stars logo on the front stretches oddly across the misshapen terrain of Mac's braced and bandaged arm under it, and Jack shakes his head fondly at the sight.

They're on Jack's couch together, the television playing quietly in the background. It's something low-key and non-stressful, far from the usual action movies he tends to favor. An episode of _Northern Exposure,_ the show Jack had referenced back in January when they'd first arrived in Duluth, Minnesota, lights the room as Mac drifts farther and farther from consciousness. He's stopped talking completely by now, laid out on his side with his legs bent to allow Jack room to sit at the other end. His eyes are almost closed, good arm hanging down towards the floor and a pillow bunched up under his head.

Before the second episode is over, Mac is out cold. Jack turns the TV off with a click of the remote, and the room shutters into silence, lit only by a lamp in the far corner. He moves slowly and tries not to make noise as he gets up and walks to a hall closet, pulling out a blanket. It's thick and heavy, and Jack shakes it out, draping it over Mac and adjusting it around his body, smoothing down creases and tucking in the corners. With this goal complete, Jack stills and just looks at him for a long moment, studying his partner's (_his kid's_ whispers a corner of his brain that's been getting louder and harder to ignore) sleeping face.

"Things are going to turn out okay for you," Jack says, voice barely above a whisper. There's a pain in his chest, dull and hot, pulsing with his heartbeat. He can't quite figure out what it is or why it's there, though he suspects it's something to do with the person wearing his hoodie over a badly injured arm, asleep on his couch. The hockey team logo rises and falls with Mac's even, steady breaths, and his face is smooth, expressionless and at peace. Reaching down, hip propped against the arm rest, Jack brushes an errant lock of hair away from Mac's forehead. Tries to ignore the sharp flare in that indescribable pain. "I'm going to make sure of it."


	33. Under Your Thumb

so uh. this chapter is a doozy and it's... really long i'm sorry sldfjs. a lot of things are coming together at this point of the fic as we speed towards some explosive moments and truths, so i suppose there's lots to get in. enjoy!

(chapter title from the unlikely candidates' 'your love could start a war')

(chapter warnings: emotional/verbal abuse escalated from usual levels in this fic, frequent discussion of injuries and medication. james as a whole.)

* * *

Mac surfaces from sleep in the slow, weighed-down way that comes from having been on heavy-duty medication. He reaches awareness after long, unsettling moments of hazed static, and the first thing he knows is pain. His head is aching and his entire body rather feels like he's been tossed in a washing machine on the spin cycle with a couple dumbbells thrown in with him for good measure, leaving him with more questions than answers. Rising above it all, though, quickly winning out against the rest of the damage, is his arm. Left arm, Mac figures out after some concentration. The shoulder is worse than the wrist, and all of it is surrounded by an odd, tight feeling.

Resigning himself to the reality that he is in fact awake, and is going to continue to feel like this as long as he remains so, Mac tries to open his eyes and sit up. In both objectives, the operative word proves to be 'tries'. The light, when he cracks his eyelids, is intolerably, stabbingly blinding, and his attempt to shuffle upright is interrupted by the sudden realization that not only does his left arm feel like he's been dangled off a roof and swung around by it, he also can't seem to get it to move. It's gathered tight up against his chest, and Mac can't lower it, can't pull it away, leaving him lopsided and off-balance. Panic is just beginning to rise in him, his lungs starting to feel tight, every discomfort he's experiencing ratcheting up in tandem, until it's all interrupted and brought to a grinding halt.

Someone's hands have caught him, by his right shoulder and his left side, palm pressed warm against his ribs as Mac is eased back down onto the surface he'd been laying on when he woke up. Ordinarily, this would have made things worse by a factor of a hundred - he's injured, had been unconscious, obviously been dosed with something pretty intense, unable to move his wounded arm, and to top it all off, when he'd tried to sit up, a pair of large, strong hands had stopped him. Somehow, though, it hadn't. Rather than send him spinning off completely into an anxiety attack, or triggering his well-trained instinct to fight off the person pushing him back down, that grip served instead to calm Mac, ground him and allow him to be still enough to catch his breath.

"Hey, Mac, it's alright. Calm down, kid, you're safe, everything's okay. We're at my apartment, things got a little dicey and exfil had to give you some meds that didn't agree with you too good." Jack. The words, the touch, the presence that gave him the sense of being able to stay here safely, vulnerable laid out on his back without use of one of his arms, it's Jack.

Identifying the person who's here with him gives Mac the push he needed to finally open his eyes, squinting hard against the still far-too-bright light streaming into the room and all around them. It takes a long moment for Mac's vision to clear, to allow him to focus enough to actually make out any detail of his surroundings, and while he lays on what appears to be a couch and gets his bearings, Jack doesn't let go.

Memory is a fickle, funny thing.

The feeling of that touch, Jack talking to him, it sends a kaleidoscope burst of disconnected recall lurching into Mac's mind. Fragments of hours past all crash into one another, contextless and uncooperative.

_Mac. Partner. Buddy. Kid._ He hears it all in Jack's voice, those names, and another too, softer and more affectionate and almost entirely forgotten, which is probably a good thing, because Mac doesn't know what he'd do with the feeling if he remembered it. The names come along with the words that had followed them, anchorless and floating detached from whatever sentences they had originally been contained in, _here, okay, easy, safe, safe, safe. _

Most of it, though, the flashes and disjointed splinters Mac can recall from what had apparently been a pretty disruptive night, is the feeling of hands. He remembers coming half-awake at sudden moments, afraid and hurting, no idea what was going on, and those hands being there every time, soothing and holding him until he went back under again, gentled back to sleep by the feeling of someone's fingers forming careful lines of guarding pressure over his side, knuckles brushing his cheek. Mac both wants to hold onto that partially-recalled feeling forever, and to avoid thinking about it too closely at all, because he knows he'd leaned into it, let himself accept and encourage the support and, worse, the comfort offered.

Blinking hard, Mac tries to focus on the here and now, on actually being able to sit up this time. The source of the inability to move his arm reveals itself to be the hoodie he's wearing, zipped up over his arm, effectively trapping it against his chest and not letting him move the injured limb too much in his sleep. He'd imagine it also would've been rather complicated to get the sleeve over the braces he's noticed he's wearing, once Jack helps him settle against the back of the couch and undo the zipper, freeing his arm. There's thick, reinforced fabric and wide straps of tough black velcro immobilizing both his shoulder and his wrist, and he pokes at them experimentally, letting out a hiss when the damaged nerves respond with a hot, bright flare.

Having deemed him awake and with it enough to know what's going on, Jack explains how they'd ended up here. Mac's shoulder had been dislocated, and his wrist as well though only partially, and they're both in place now after simple reductions. DXS medical had run x-rays that showed no damage, and the prognosis was good. The final word from the doctor overseeing his case was that he should make a quick recovery with no lasting damage, and it's a relief to hear. There's always a question at the back of Mac's mind, whenever something like this happens, if this might finally be it for him. If this might be the mission that, one way or another, took him out of the game. _Most people,_ he can remember being cautioned by one of his old partners, Cassandra Hall, stiffly and disapprovingly after he'd nearly drowned on a mission once, _save at least _some _of their nine lives for after they hit their thirties, MacGyver._

Jack doesn't scold him. He doesn't narrow his eyes or purse his lips or tell Mac he should've known better than to end up in a situation leaving him with one-and-a-half dislocations and an intolerance to medications reducing him to camping out on his partner's couch all night, disturbing him a dozen times when he woke up incoherent and freaking out. Instead, he sits on the coffee table in front of Mac, filling in the rest of what happened after Mac was too out of it to remember in an easygoing, casual voice. Eventually, he must decide that Mac isn't going to keel back over again if he's let out of his sight, because Jack claps his hands to his knees and stands up.

"I was just about to throw on some breakfast," Jack says as he walks back around the couch, towards the kitchen. Mac's been here before a handful of times, and has a pretty good grasp of where things are, even without contorting his aching body to visually track his partner's movements. Though he has to admit, spending the night is a first.

From the other room, slightly raised so as to carry clearly, Jack's voice continues. "Medical sent us home with some more pills. Dr. Coyle said it was stuff she'd given you before, she's been with DXS longer than Matty has, but I wanted to wait until you were totally with it to try and give you anything. They're on the coffee table, see if you recognize the label and take two. I know you've gotta be in a lot of pain."

Mac doesn't respond verbally. His gaze flicks to the coffee table next to where Jack had just been sitting, and sure enough, there's a truly cliched orange bottle with a white cap, perched innocently on top of the polished wood. He's able to reach out and nab it without too much strain, and a look at the label tells him that it is indeed a drug he's familiar with, one he's taken before with no adverse side effects. Even so, Mac hesitates, doesn't try and remove the cap himself or ask Jack to come and help him get it open.

The pain isn't _that_ bad, objectively speaking. Mac knows he can grit his teeth and tough it out without losing track of what's going on around him or becoming unable to speak as it seized his body in riptides. It had only been bad enough to do that on the plane because he'd been panicking. Freaking out just makes things worse, he knows this, and he only has his own nerves to blame for getting him so worked up that it had reached that point.

During his first major in-the-field injury, Mac had been partnered with Seth Haken, who he'd later describe to Bozer as 'duller than a box of single-size socket wrenches'. His father had been in the field with them for once, needing a rather squirrely contact of his in Beirut to cooperate to get the intel they needed. Mac had taken a bad fall when evading their bad guy of the month, and when Haken had suggested mildly that maybe they ought to call exfil in early or take him to a local doctor for something to dull the shooting blades of hot pain in his leg leaving Mac crouched on the floor gasping, James had cut him off. He'd snapped at Haken to watch the door while he had a word with Mac.

Haken had backed off and rolled his eyes when James's attention was off him, stepping outside to do as instructed. He'd never really cared much about what was going on beside his specific marching orders anyway. As uninteresting a person as he was, he was equally as uninterested in the world around him, and never asked a question he didn't have to. A good operative, Haken had lasted longer than most, but Mac had always known he was an irritating mission objective to the man at the best of times.

Once Mac's partner was gone, James had crouched down next to him and said, "Angus, you need to calm down."

Half breathless with pain and still slumped on the floor, shoulder braced against a cold cement wall, Mac had blinked at him, unsure what he'd meant.

"I said to _calm,_" James repeated slowly, voice firm and just slightly raised from his normal speaking volume, "_down._ I know it feels like it's bad, but it only hurts this much because you're freaking out. If you just calm down, it'll feel better, the pain will lessen, and you'll be able to focus."

And Mac tried. He really did, breathing in deeply and slowly, trying to focus past the way he feels like his ankle's been crushed in a bear trap. When he snuck a look at it, it _looked_ fine, which had lent credence to what James was saying. But then he tried to move, and it surged back up again, all of Mac's attention focused on the screaming limb.

"You just have to find it in yourself to overcome this," James told him, still in that calm voice. "Try harder. Deep breaths, calm down."

"I can't." It came out in a pathetic wheeze, airless and edged in a whine. "I _can't."_

When James responded, it was louder. Harder. "When you signed up for this world, you checked 'I can't' at the door," he'd said, and Mac had cringed, hands hovering over his own injured ankle, away from the anger he'd thought he might have caught hint of behind the words. "Don't ever let me catch the words 'I can't' coming out of your mouth again. You _will._"

So Mac had nodded, swiftly and jerkily, and grit his teeth, forcing himself up off the floor. He'd breathed as calmly as he could, waiting for the pain to die down. It never really did, just eased slightly over time, as he focused harder and harder on the job still left to do.

His ankle had been fractured. They found out when they got home.

"Food's almost ready, if you wanna make your way in here at some point." Jack's voice cuts through the memory, bringing him back to the present with a small, sharp inhale.

Mac doesn't know how much time he lost sitting there on the couch, and it's an unnerving thought that it could have been full minutes spent staring off into middle distance, thinking about Seth Haken and Beirut and a broken ankle. He tries to clear his mind of that mission, just one in a long line of missions that had been successes with asterisks attached. Instead, he focuses on the feeling of the sun on his face, streaming in from the bright day outside, the sound of Jack in the kitchen clattering around.

His arm gives a dull throb, and Mac looks down at it, face twisted in distaste. He's still wearing a hoodie that doesn't belong to him and he studies it for a moment. It's a shamrock green color, with the Dallas Stars hockey team logo split in half by the open zipper, something he only recognizes because Jack has put games on TV before, when he was at the house while Bozer was out and Mac was working on his motorcycle or another project.

Slowly, stiffly, trying his best to ignore how much it hurts to move at all, Mac levers himself up off the couch one-handed. He shuffles into the kitchen, sits down heavily at the small table off to the side, and watches Jack cook. The man is standing at the stove stirring something in a pot, and Mac cringes. He's not really feeling too hungry, and honestly a little nauseated thinking of eating, but he's going to try, because Jack is cooking breakfast for him and he can't be rude. Not when Jack never had to do any of this and Mac already owes him so deeply by now it's dizzying to think about.

He looks down when Jack sets a bowl in front of him. The contents appear to be some kind of oatmeal or grits or other hot cereal, with pieces of cut fruit mixed in. It smells sweet in a kind of mild, unassertive way that doesn't have his fragile stomach turning, and Mac is lost for words.

It's a little overwhelming, to be sitting here in somebody's sun filled kitchen on a bright, calm morning, with breakfast they hand-made for him, wearing someone else's sweater they'd helped dress him in when he'd been unable to handle dressing himself. Mac's eyes feel hot and itchy, his throat tight. He's finding himself getting choked up by the simple, unbearable kindness of it all. And because that's ridiculous, he clears his throat and starts to slowly eat his cereal.

So distracted is he by the odd feelings he's trying to swallow down with spoonfuls of fruit and cereal that Mac doesn't notice when Jack walks out of the room or back in again, at least until there's a plastic rattle, a hollowed tap, and the bottle of pills is on the table next to his water glass. Jack doesn't say anything, but he doesn't need to. The message is in the bottle, untouched and still full.

"Don't need them," Mac mutters, barely refraining from doing something unforgivably childish and pushing the pills away like a kindergartener confronted with a plate of vegetables.

"I beg to differ, kid, I can see it in your face. You're in way too much pain."

_Too much pain for what?_ Mac almost asks, because they don't have a task in front of them right now, no objective to tackle, no time-sensitive mission to complete. He can't puzzle out what it is Jack thinks he's in too much pain to be doing, or what he's gauging to be 'too much' and how. The orange plastic bottle doesn't hold the answers either, though Mac keeps staring at it like it does, like there's something there for him besides a clouded mind and slowed reflexes. When he's silent for too long, Jack lets out a muted sigh and pulls the other chair up to the table, sitting down with Mac.

"Okay, it's time to talk about this," he says, and the words are gentle and quiet, almost resigned. Like Jack is sad to say them, and it's this that causes Mac to look up. "You said something yesterday on the plane, about how it wouldn't hurt so bad if you stopped panicking."

Had he said that? Mac can't remember, but he wouldn't be surprised if he had. It's what he's been taught, over and over, and for some reason in moments like those, fearful and hazed, he's always had an easier time finding James's words than his own.

"Seemed to think," Jack goes on, "that the reason you were in pain was because you were, quote, 'freaking out', and not because you were seriously injured."

Mac still doesn't say anything, but Jack doesn't seem cowed by this. His voice continues in that soft but unwavering tone, almost like James's had been when Mac broke his ankle that day in Beirut, except somehow exactly the opposite.

"I need you to hear something, even if you don't understand it yet."

Unable to bear the look on Jack's face, Mac looks down and away. Takes another spoonful of food, though it tastes like ash in his mouth and he can barely swallow it down. The rest stays where it is, slowly cooling as Mac can't bring himself to take another bite.

"When someone is violent to you," and if Mac gives just the slightest flinch at the word, he figures he can blame it on a twinge in his wrist, "physically violent or- or emotionally violent, Mac, the pain that comes from that is real. The pain you feel, any pain you feel, kid, is real."

There's pain now alright. Mac's throat has closed off again, and it feels like someone's got a vice grip around his chest, squeezing until his lungs are about to pop. He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to sit here at this table, wearing this hoodie that's so soft and warm and comfortable, listening to Jack talk to him like he's small and scared, because isn't that just the truth of the matter? Mac _feels_ small and scared, far more often than he likes to admit to even himself, and right now he feels something else, too. Seen. He feels _seen,_ like he's been stripped of everything he's pretended to be and fooled a lot of people into thinking he is and all that's left is a kid in over his head, wishing someone would come around on a life-raft and hold out a hand.

"It's not your fault, and you didn't cause it." Apparently, Jack still isn't done. "Feeling pain is part of being human and you should never be expected to act like that's not true. I see it, I can see it in your face. So please, if you can bring yourself to at all, please take the pills. Whatever you're worried I'm gonna think, whatever you think it says about you… I won't and it doesn't."

Mac takes the pills. He finishes his breakfast, too, and then stays seated at the kitchen table for a long time while the medication takes effect, listening to the rote, domestic sounds of Jack cleaning up. One of the strangest things he'd noted about his partner's apartment is the man doesn't have a dishwasher, preferring instead to hand-wash his dishes and set them to dry in a rack set up on the counter. At some point, Mac thinks, he ought to ask about that. There's sure to be a story behind it - there usually is, with Jack.

As the morning drags on late and slow, the loud, bright sunlight warming the living room air, Mac sits on the couch. He feels fuzzy and spaced out, losing track of his thoughts more than once and having a little trouble following the handful of conversations he and Jack drift into, but an injury like this will keep their team grounded for at least a week, and he has nothing he needs to be doing today, so it's not the end of the world. And it's done its job too. The pain is, while not totally gone, dimmed and dulled down to more of a bruised throb than the sense that someone is yanking on his arm every few seconds, trying to pull it out of its socket again. For a while, for a long, calm while, things are okay.

They watch more of some show Mac can't recall the name of that has a lot of snow - he thinks the protagonist is a doctor or something - and he takes another dose of painkillers after a couple of hours. Riley stops by at some point, dropping herself down on the couch next to him and playing some number puzzle game on her phone. It's not entirely clear why she's there - it's not like Mac is great conversation at the moment - but Jack doesn't ask questions, so neither does he. At some point the conclusion is drawn that Mac will be able to go home tonight, now that he's more with it, and able to recall his story clearly.

After a while, Riley leaves, wishing them both a warm goodbye and briefly scratching her fingers through the back of Mac's hair, nails skimming his scalp in an affectionate move that has him closing his eyes and leaning into it, on her way to the door. It's once she's been gone for at least twenty minutes, Jack poking around in the other room doing something Mac is sure he's been told about and promptly forgot in the still hazy swirl of his fogged brain, that everything changes.

There's a buzz at Mac's hip, and he frowns down at the pocket of the hoodie he and Jack had, in a coordinated effort, worked his braced arm into so he wasn't left with it half actually on, half draped awkwardly and continually slipping off his shoulder. It's a good thing Jack is bigger than him, because it leaves room in the sleeve and shoulders for the material strapping his strained joints in place without too much strain on the fabric. Mac's phone had, somewhere during all of that, ended up in the pocket. This is the first time it's gone off, and he fishes around for it awkwardly, wondering why he'd put it in the left pocket when it was his right hand that he was capable of using, and then every other thought in his mind freezes still.

"Jack," he says around the lump that's suddenly formed in his throat.

"Yeah, bud? What's up?" Jack pokes his head back into the living room, leaning casually against the wall.

"Can you drive me in to work? Later, I mean. I just- I can't drive with…" Trailing off, Mac shrugs his good shoulder awkwardly, hoping the rest of that explanation will take care of itself. His mouth feels dry and his words slowed.

Now Jack walks all the way into the living room, a frown overtaking his face. "Why are you going in? You're in a sling, and I didn't get a call."

"He's got me coming in for review, y'know," Mac explains, trying to rush through it too fast for either of them to get caught up on what that means. The attention focused on him has him feeling embarrassed, cheeks heating when Jack's frown doesn't lessen, rather getting deeper. More worried. "It's fine, I can probably call a taxi or something-"

"No, you're not going to call a taxi," interrupts Jack, shaking his head. "Of course I'll drive you, but a review? Today, after that? I'm just… surprised." Surprised doesn't sound like the right word.

Nodding, Mac tries to brush it off. "You gotta admit, things went pretty badly. It'll be fine, it's better to get it over with." They don't talk about it more than that, but there's a different feeling now, a heavy weight over what was previously a light, easy day.

On the drive in, Mac tries not to pay too close attention to the look on Jack's face. He's got plenty to distract him at least - he'd timed his last dose of painkillers so that it would be wearing off by the time specified in the text from James, and his shoulder is feeling worse than it has all day. By the time he reaches the conference room he's been summoned to, he's much sharper, completely aware of what's going on around him, but the pain is slowly mounting, and he can see the concern on Jack's face when they part ways.

James, waiting for him in the conference room, studies him a long moment when he walks in. His eyes are calculating and evaluating, and his eyebrows are creeping up as he takes in what he's seeing, the obnoxiously green Dallas Stars hoodie Mac is _still_ wearing, the sling he's got on over it. The edge of the wrist brace, poking out from the sleeve.

"Heard you didn't break anything," is the first thing he says, neutral and almost bored sounding. Wordlessly, Mac nods, and James moves on, asking in a slightly more stern tone, "Do you know how you're going to explain… all that to your roommate?"

Rather than follow the acidic instinct lurching into his mouth to point out that James has known Bozer for going on fifteen years and very well knows his name, Mac swallows it down and says instead, "Flight of stairs."

With a slight scoff in the back of his throat, James gestures to his good hand, where the sleeve has ridden up somewhat, exposing the bruising left behind on both his wrists by the handcuffs he'd been wearing when he'd gone down. "Because _that's_ going to justify your little bracelet there. Though I guess… whatever the hell it is you're wearing right now's got long sleeves, try and keep them pulled down."

This is not exactly Mac's first rodeo, and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep himself from pointing this out. The pain has left him with a shorter fuse than usual, on the verge of saying something that would land him in far deeper trouble than he's already surely in, and given it's only been a minute or so, that's not a good record to start with.

"So you know why I called you in here today, I'm sure," James says, finally getting to the point. This is a trick question. It always is, but Mac knows he has to answer it anyway.

"Because things went wrong."

"Because things went _wrong,"_ James repeats back to him, voice going suddenly hard, "and you need to explain to me exactly what happened and exactly how you're not going to let it happen again. How you're going to let something like that," referring definitely not to the injury itself, but to the incident with the adverse reaction to the medication after it, "from happening in the _middle_ of a mission rather than just at the end of one."

"That's gonna be hard, given that it happened because you took my medical information out of my file and I was in too much pain to _think straight_ never mind remember my allergies and tell anyone about them." It's about before Mac can stop it, and while two for three is not a bad record, this was the worst retort of the three, and objectively the one he should've tried hardest to keep to himself. No matter, though. It's out, now, and he can't take it back.

"Don't be dramatic," snaps James, now definitely irritated, and going to land in angry shortly if something doesn't happen to diffuse things. "You don't have any _allergies,_ Angus, you have a handful of sensitivities and if you didn't want to deal with the consequences, you shouldn't have let them give you anything until you calmed down enough to, as you put it, think straight. Pain is a panic response, you just need to-"

"Calm down, I know," Mac shoots back, because he's in for a penny at this point, he may as well pay the pound of flesh for getting to speak his mind for once, Jack's words from that morning throbbing at his temples like a headache. "I didn't stub my toe, dad, I got my shoulder _and_ my wrist dislocated. At the same time."

"You address me with respect in this building, I'm _done_ reminding you about this." And there it is, the helpless inevitability of the anger, crashing down on them both, a curtain call signalling the epilogue act, the one the audience never gets to see. "Your wrist was a partial and your shoulder was reduced by one exfil agent on a moving plane, stop trying to make me sound like some kind of monster here. I'm just trying to keep you from being too reliant on things that will dull your performance."

Something feels different this time. Maybe it's the pain in his arm, maybe the lingering inhibition lowering properties of the pills, but this time, Mac feels it too. The anger that characterizes these meetings, rising in his chest and making him feel breathless and fevered.

"We were _on exfil,_" he says, voice pitching up, incredulous and upset. "My performance was _over_, and I needed _painkillers,_ I was in- It hurt. It hurt _so bad_ I couldn't _think,_ I-" Mac stops, breath caught up in a surprised hitch, sharp and stinging.

It's been more than a year since the last time he made the mistake of letting himself get so worked up he actually started to cry during a review, but standing here, trying desperately to get James to understand exactly how much agony he'd been in when he let Lucia Sosa drug him, it's a narrow thing. Because James is still glaring at him, something shocked in his thundered brow, like he can't believe this conversation has gone in the direction it has. Mac abandons that angle, hope for getting his father to understand how it had felt to be in that much pain, that he'd _needed_ the meds, falling away, replaced by something else. Anger is easier to take. Anger is safer than… than this.

"Why is my file still gone from the system?"

James actually rolls his eyes, arms folding tightly over his chest. "You know why I took your file out of the system. We've been over that, you understand why I did it. The kind of things the people who got into my agency could have done with that information? What someone like Walsh could do?"

"The infiltration is over! You figured it out, you fired anyone involved in the breach and then a bunch of other people for good measure-"

"Are you actually questioning my decisions as director of this agency right now?"

"-there's no reason my file still needs to be out of the system. They need that information, exfil and medical _need_ to know my medical history, they-"

"We're here to discuss errors made on your recent mission-"

Now it's Mac's turn to interrupt, launching into the sentence and cutting the rest of whatever James had been about tos ay dead as he almost shouts, "Your _error_ could've risked my _life,_ why was my-"

"Angus, shut up! Listen to me and just _shut up!"_ As he repeats the order, loud and furious, James takes a step forward, and that's what does it, what finally takes all the air from his lungs, reducing Mac to silence. His shoulder gives a massive pulse of pain and it takes everything in him not to flinch hard and retreat, to bolt out of the room at the anger on James's face and the tension radiating from his posture.

When he was still living at home with his father, this is what preceded the moments knew Mac he was on the thinnest ice he's ever stood on with James, the small gasp of empty space between the yelling and a cupboard door cracking shut, or a book slamming onto the table. What would then follow was a quick exit, James either storming from the room or the house itself, leaving Mac alone in an empty room with the reverberating bang of the door deafening him, shaking and scared shitless, feeling like he's narrowly escaped something. Like he got very, very lucky.

There's a long pause, like the one when he'd first walked into the conference room, but this one isn't empty. It's charged and crowded and Mac has no way of knowing what's about to happen next. And it's in that precise moment that Mac, frozen in place and barely able to breathe, looks over James's shoulder and comes to a realization that stops his breath entirely. Nobody had frosted the glass, this time, when they went into that conference room, and it's through the pristine, clear glass of the walls that Mac makes direct eye contact with Jack.

The first thing Jack takes in is Mac's posture, shrunk rigidly back in on himself with a harsh stiffness that's sure to be aggravating his injuries. Then, it's the look on his face, some combination of anger and hurt and blatant fear, and how quickly it switches off when they lock eyes, until there's nothing there, expression gone dead and blank. Jack can't hear what's being said but he can read Mac's lips as he responds to the loud hum of whatever James is railing at him. He says nothing aside from two phrases, short and piercing.

Yes, sir.

Sorry, sir.

Jack steps out of the way around the corner, hoping not to be noticed, when James starts to turn away. His heart thuds in his throat, so hard he wonders if it's audible outside his own body. When the door opens, he hears the tail end of some piece of whatever James had been on the warpath about, including a name. It's not one he's heard before, and Jack files it away for future reference, because now the door is slamming shut behind James, leaving Jack to wonder how reinforced the glass of the door is, that it didn't shatter on impact, if it was designed that way due to the nature of the building or if James had ever cracked a door when he punctuated one of his 'reviews' with needless violence against the room itself.

It takes a long time for Mac to come out of the room. Jack knows that Mac knows he's there, had seen him and knew he was watching at least part of the review, and it takes a lot of effort to refrain from going in himself. The last thing he wants right now is for Mac to feel cornered and trapped, interrogated all over again. So he stands outside, moved back to the middle of the hallway now that the threat of James seeing him has passed.

When Mac does leave, he walks right past Jack and starts for the door. Following him, Jack takes the moment to openly scrutinize him, and what he sees is not encouraging. Mac is shaking slightly, trembling visible in the stiff line of his shoulders, and he's moving like he's hurting again, like Jack's suspicions had been correct and he hadn't actually taken his last dose of medication

They're back in the car, engine started and idling in the parking lot, when Jack breaks the silence between them. "So do you want me to-"

"I just want to go home," Mac says, interrupting and then immediately cringing, looking sharply away out the window. Jack doesn't respond verbally, just picks the bottle of painkillers out of the center console of the car and holds it out, then passing him a water bottle. It's enough of a win when he takes them, with just enough hesitation that Jack wonders if he's actually going to.

They're almost to Mac and Bozer's house when Jack can't resist any longer, asking the question that's been in the back of his mind for a long time. He has a suspicion he already knows the answer, but he needs Mac to confirm it before he'll actually believe it.

"So, these reviews," he says, trying to keep his voice as light and casual as possible. "When's my number gonna come up?"

"It's not going to." The answer is short and clipped and sends a cold stillness into Jack's body.

"Come again." He'd understood perfectly the first time, but there's a lot here he still doesn't understand, and this might be his chance to get Mac to talk about it. "You've been in how many of these mission review thingies, and I've definitely been around long enough to start doing them too."

"It's not about how long you've been here. He doesn't do that with everybody."

"So just…" Jack trails off, letting Mac finish putting the last piece into place, the truth forming around itself in a clear picture.

"Just me." Mac sounds exhausted, but there's something else there too. It's a tension Jack barely picks up on and can't categorize, definitely not well enough to know that what he is about to do would go so terribly wrong.

"These meetings, like the one I just saw part of, going over things that went wrong on our very dangerous, highly stressful missions, they're something he only does with you. That kind of one-on-one, you're the only one that gets pulled into them."

They're just pulling around the corner of Mac's street, three houses down from his front door, and that's when the kid snaps.

"Yeah," he says, voice sharp and verging on mad. "Sorry to disappoint you, Jack, but if you want to get a crack at him, then you're gonna have to do it some other way." His shoulders are moving up and down rapidly, his breathing audible in the sudden, shocked silence in the car.

"Mac, I-" Jack starts, and stops again, dread surging in his gut. "Do you want to talk about what went down with him? It looked bad, it looked like-"

"I can't do this right now." The seatbelt comes undone with a loud snap, and before Jack knows what's going on, Mac is stepping out of the car. "I have to go. Good luck finding someone else to answer your questions about the Director. Just _go,_ Jack."

The door shuts behind him, and as Mac's retreating back grows smaller and harder to see in the dim of dusk, Jack has no option but to keep sitting there, watching him, wondering what the hell just happened. The dread building in him gets stronger, heavier, and he's left with the distinct impression that he's just made some kind of terrible mistake and he doesn't have the faintest idea what it could've been.


	34. Did I Even Make A Sound

_on one hand i would apologize for how long this chapter got, but on the other hand once you read it i'm sure you'll understand why i didn't want to leave things off in the middle of this one._

_also, it's worth noting that i have no idea what it's like to work in a hospital and what the protocols are, and the medical and hospital information in this chapter is based off my best-effort internet research and a healthy amount of 'making it up for the sake of the narrative'. apologies to any nurses or other industry professionals reading this._

_now, onward, time for mac to WOEFULLY misinterpret some things!_

_(chapter title from owl city's cover of a dear evan hansen song, 'waving through a window')_

_(warnings: serious illness, hospitals, generally a pretty heavy chapter.)_

* * *

It's been almost a week.

Thanks to his shoulder and wrist, the team has been benched, save for a few projects in IT Riley has been asked to assist on. Mac doesn't know if Jack has been called in to work on anything or help out with any kind of training exercises, because that would require him to have talked to Jack since the night of the review, which he hasn't. He has been camped out at home for the duration, moved to hiding by his own cowardice and inability to face the truth.

If he were honest, Mac has been suspecting it for some time now - definitely since Amsterdam when Riley had told him she thought the Director of mishandling things on their missions. Riley's narrow-eyed scrutiny of the Director's choices, the private meetings between Jack and Matty that they both seem to think Mac doesn't know about, and now his last real conversation with Jack, all the questions the man had been asking, about reviews, about James… The scale has tipped, and the truth has crashed down, and he knows what all this means, the implications it has for the best partnership he's ever had.

What it means is that none of it had ever been about him at all. Not protecting him on missions, not hanging around him when they weren't on assignment, not picking him up in the morning and driving to work together… Jack is here for James. Not for Mac. Mac wasn't even the mission, he was the _mark,_ the contact, the inside informant who unwittingly became means to an end. Except…

(Except for the way Jack had held him, in the dying light of the evening sun, cradled the back of Mac's head in a strong, fighter's hand and sat on the ground with him for far too long. Except for the green hoodie, now thrown over the back of the chair in Mac's room where he'd tossed it after storming inside, the one Jack had dressed him in when he couldn't dress himself without help. Except for the hazed, choppy memory of Jack being there, over and over, when he woke in the night not even a week ago.)

It's all so confusing, evidence warring with feeling and Mac caught in the middle. He pinballs over the course of days, snapping from hurt to angry to guilty. Anger feels the safest, but guilty feels more right, and hurt is impossible to stop, and underneath it all is foolish, foolish, _foolish._

There's only one thing he knows for sure, and that is this. The next time he sees Jack, he's going to ask, and Jack is going to tell him the truth. And so Mac is avoiding him, because he doesn't know if he can handle facing that last piece of confirmation, that everything he'd been finally allowing himself to hope for had never been real at all.

One way or another, it all comes to a head tomorrow. Tomorrow they are back in the field, for a lowkey surveillance mission that isn't supposed to take longer than forty-eight hours. Mac has been just barely cleared by DXS medical to return to regular activity with a strong caution that if he takes risks with his injuries, his shoulder especially, he puts himself in jeopardy of permanent damage, and James isn't wasting any time. In less than a day he's going to be forced into a room facing Jack, and he'll know for sure.

All morning, the anticipation of the following day looming over him like a thundercloud with the promise of a downpour in its belly, Mac has been keyed up. He's working on his bike in the living room now, testing the capacities of his wrist, which luckily seems in complete working order, if a bit sore. Bozer isn't home and the house feels empty and echoing around him, something off and wrong about the air itself. Eventually, Mac gets up and switches on the radio, fiddling with the dial and settling on a station, going back to what he's doing. The music helps, and he feels more relaxed, finally getting into some kind of groove, until it all comes to a screeching halt.

The music, which Mac hasn't entirely been paying attention to, has come to a pause while the hosts of the station introduce an ad break, "You've been listening to Los Angeles ninety-five point five."

Los Angeles ninety-five point five. Classic rock. Jack's favorite station, the one Mac has gotten so used to hearing in the car, in Whittacker and Tam's lab when they let him use it, at home when his partner is just hanging out, that it's become background noise, a comforting blur.

Before he realizes what he's doing, Mac has dropped his screwdriver, stood up, and switched off the radio so sharply his palm stings from how hard he's hit the button. He can't stand this anymore, has to do something, anything, so Mac decides to go for a run. Running has helped a lot in the past, on days where he needs to get out of his own head, to push his body far and hard enough that all he can feel is the sun and pavement.

Leaving his house and heading for the park at the peak of the nearby hill, Mac takes with him only his wallet, even his phone remaining in his room. He doesn't want to be haunted by the text message on it, unopened and unanswered, Jack asking if he wants a ride in to work the next morning. It's an unseasonably hot day outside, and the lack of practice has him at a slower pace than he's used to, and Mac pushes himself harder, speeding up as the asphalt begins to incline up the hill. His shoulder aches, deep and steady, but it's not bad enough to stop him, so he keeps going.

Along the way, he passes by a few others out for exercise of one kind of another, outpacing all of them quickly. The sun beats relentlessly down, shimmering up off the pavement and reflecting back onto him like the sky and the ground are in a conspiracy to bake him between them. By the time he crests the hill, seeing the park a little ways off in the distance, Mac is starting to feel… off. His breathing is uneven and slightly ragged, and his muscles are beginning to hurt in a way he's not used to as part of the usual consequences of running a few miles. It's when he turns his head to follow the sound of one nearby jogger calling out to another and is overtaken by a wave of dizziness so strong he nearly loses his balance entirely that Mac knows something is wrong.

With his head swimming and his throat dry and parched, Mac decides to head for a gas station. A bottle of water will do him some good, dehydration likely the culprit for the uncooperative malfunctioning beginning to overtake his body. As he goes towards where he remembers passing one a small ways back on the road, Mac feels rapidly much worse. His heart beats fast and shallow, his chest feels tight, and breathing is becoming progressively more difficult.

Slowing down, Mac decides to just walk the rest of the way. The building is in sight now, and he swallows against his sandpaper throat. It's getting hotter and hotter now under the unforgiving sun. The day must be reaching over a hundred degrees, and Mac is confused as to how it happened this fast.

Crossing the street towards the gas station, Mac stumbles. He's at the opposite sidewalk, going to step up onto it, when his knees give out and he collapses hard onto the ground, catching his palm and skinning it on rough concrete but managing not to hit his head in the process. His injured shoulder, folded awkwardly under his body, protests loudly, and his vision greys and fades in and out. Mac can't seem to focus, can't get his legs back under him.

Distantly, he realizes someone is talking to him, an alarmed voice growing closer and closer until it's right over him and someone's hand is on his shoulder. At the unfamiliar touch, Mac flinches sharply away, curling in on himself on the ground. It's too hot. The ground is too hot, the air is too hot, his lungs are too hot. Mac feels like he's dying, like in minutes he's gone from mostly-okay to burning alive. Somewhere in the part of his brain that's still maintaining any amount of situational awareness, he thinks he can hear a siren getting closer.

There are questions now. People are asking him questions, questions Mac can't answer, because he hears the words themselves, sure, but they fall apart into sand as soon as he tries to understand them. Paramedics, probably, hands now all over his body, pulling him onto his side and stretching him out over the hellfire ground, someone saying 'sir' loudly and clearly in his ear over and over again.

'Wallet', he catches and comprehends, and then 'sir' turns into 'Mr. MacGyver' and Mac shakes his head against the gloved hands trying to hold it still.

"Mac," he manages through a raw, arid throat, mouth finally cooperating enough to speak. "It's Mac. Mac."

'Mr. MacGyver' thankfully turns into 'Mac', and the paramedic's voice snaps into clarity just in time for him to hear her say, "-taking you the hospital, okay? They're gonna take good care of you, just hang tight."

Then suddenly, the voices rise in pitch and volume, overlapping and overtaking each other as Mac's awareness fades away again, with a greater finality this time. The last thing he feels is the ground falling out from under him, and then all that's left is fire.

An indeterminate amount of time later, Mac resurfaces slowly and barely into a shallow consciousness. His entire body feels fragile and light, like anyone or anything could blow him away or snap him in two and he wouldn't be able to do anything to stop it. The fire is gone, now, but ice seems to have replaced it, and he's far, far too cold. Mac's fingers twitch slightly at his side as he tries to feel around for the green hoodie he knows he still has, but they won't move farther than that, which is a shame, because now that he's remembered it, he really, _really_ wants that hoodie.

The air smells of antiseptic and there's a small pinching feeling in his elbow, and these things in combination is enough for Mac to identify that he's in a hospital. His eyelids feel too heavy to drag open when he tries, barely cracking them to peer around. There's a woman with dark hair standing next to him trying to talk to him, but Mac is out again before he can answer her or ask where the hoodie is or why he's so cold.

The next time he wakes, it's a blond man, standing where the woman had been, noting something down on a monitor. Something feels wrong. Mac feels like something is deeply, deeply wrong. He's in a hospital and he doesn't remember why and he feels like he's freezing, like there's a foot of snow and ice pressing his body down into this unfamiliar bed, and there's a man he doesn't recognize standing next to him. There's no one else in the room, upon a quick survey, and it's this that finally drives Mac into a panic.

Alone. He's alone, and doesn't _want_ to be, and he's incapacitated. If someone were to try anything right now, he'd be helpless to stop them, and the thought, crashing into what cognition he's wrestled ahold of, is terrifying. His breathing quickens, chest jerking in faint gasps under the heavy blanket, and there's something else underneath it, too. Buried under the fear is a bone-deep ache, a pain and sadness he can't name. Until he can.

Jack. He wants Jack.

Jack should be here, Mac thinks with a jolt, hand twitching again. Jack is always here when he's in pain, not a time he can think of in their partnership where Jack left him while he was hurting. Not on a mission and not at home either. The last time Mac had been in pain and scared and not sure what was going on, Jack had wrapped him in his own sweater and zipped it around him and told him he was safe, that everything was going to be okay.

Since the blond man is still here, and hasn't tried to hurt or kill Mac yet, Mac tries to ask him. His mouth feels clumsy and numb, as uncooperative as his twitching hands. _Call Jack,_ he tries to say, _please, I need you to call Jack._

The man doesn't understand.

_Please,_ Mac thinks, tries to say, barely hears his own voice come out in a frightened, breathy jumble, "Jack. Call Jack."

There's a reason, Mac knows there is, why Jack isn't here, and he can't think of it right now, though it makes him that much more scared. Did something happen to him? Is he okay? The man still doesn't understand, and Mac shakes his head, grits his teeth, and then tries again, as clearly as possible, "Please, he should be here, I don't know why he's not here. Please."

Apparently giving up on trying to understand the man, dressed in what Mac thinks might be a nurse's uniform of dark green scrubs, leaves, and Mac's head tips back. His eyes feel wet and he's shaking all over and he can't make it stop, so he just lays there and breathes and tries not to feel so scared. It doesn't work. He still can't find Jack.

* * *

Brooke Arroyo hasn't been at work for very long. She's been on-shift for maybe twenty minutes, the coworker she's taking over briefing her on the emergency department's handful of patients before taking off, and is just getting settled when a voice calls to her. Looking up, she sees a blond man walking rapidly towards her, an anxious frown on his face. It's Kip Hawthorne, the new nurse on her shift, nice but still very green and obviously at this moment in time, out of his depth.

"What's going on?" she asks when he reaches her, and he jerks a thumb over his shoulder at the patient room he's just walked out of.

"Our heat stroke guy," Kip says, referring to the patient in room seven, twenty-four year old male brought in by ambulance who collapsed on a run from apparent heat stroke. "He's awake and he's kind of freaking out, I don't know what to do. EMS said he had no phone on him when he was brought in, right?"

"Yeah," Brooke confirms, closing the chart she'd been working on when he'd arrived. This is clearly going to be more involved than a quick question about hospital protocol or the location of supplies. "There wasn't one on him or in the immediate area, why?"

"He's asking me to call somebody and he's getting pretty worked up, but I can't figure out what the name is or anything. Guy's pretty out of it, we've got him on benzos because the cooling blankets started making him shiver so hard that Trish thought he was going to chip a tooth or something."

Rounding the counter at the nurse's station at the center of the ward, Brooke pulls up the file on room seven in the system. She presses a few keys and then reads off what she finds to her nervous colleague, standing across the counter from her now, shifting from foot to foot.

"So for Angus MacGyver, we have listed here an emergency contact and a health-care proxy. Same person, James MacGyver, says it's his father. He's the one Trish called when he was brought in, right? The card in his wallet?"

Trish, the nurse who'd handed off the shift to Brooke not even half an hour ago, had told her that when bed seven came in, there had been a card in his wallet, requesting that in case of an emergency, the number on it be called. The woman had said they'd done so, but the guy on the other end didn't seem particularly interested, which Brooke thought was an odd characterization. Apparently, once he found out that MacGyver the younger was going to be okay, he'd said to call if things took a turn for the worse, and hung up.

"James, that has to be it," Kip says suddenly, snapping his fingers. "The name he kept trying to say, it had a J-A sound. That has to be him, poor guy was asking for his dad."

"Well if it's going to calm him down if we can get the guy on the phone," Brooke tells him, standing up and walking back around the counter, towards the room of the person in question, "then we should do that. Let them talk for a minute if he's coherent enough to speak. He's not going to do himself any favors if he panics."

Once in the room, Kip hovering awkwardly at her shoulder keeping an eye on the vitals of the patient the paramedics informed them insisted on being called 'Mac' right before he passed out, Brooke runs through a few orienting questions. He's weak and hard to understand, but he seems by now able to speak and respond to basic questions, so she can't see the harm in letting him talk to his dad, if that's what he needs to relax and let the treatment do its work in bringing his temperature back down to a safe level. Picking up the corded phone in the room, Brooke dials for him and then hands him the phone.

Looking over her shoulder as it rings, Brooke motions for Kip to step out, and moves into the hall herself to give him some privacy. She waits just outside though, watching in case he passes out or needs help. He talks inaudibly for a minute, his face scrunching up into a distressed frown when the person on the other end responds. To be honest, as insistent as he'd apparently been to get James MacGyver on the phone, it doesn't seem like it's helping.

It actually seems like it's making him worse, to the point that Brooke, upon noting that his vitals are rising rapidly, decides that enough is enough and this needs to stop now. This is her patient, and if this phone conversation is harming him, then it needs to end before things can get worse. The moment she re-enters, though, the call seems to have come to an abrupt end, and the phone is now held in Mac's lax fingers, on the bed at his side. One of the cooling pads laid over his overheated body has slipped somewhat, and she walks over to straighten it out, hanging the phone up while she's at it.

"Was there somebody else you needed us to call?" Brooke asks, now doubting that they'd got it right in the first place. Maybe Kip had been wrong, and his father wasn't the intended recipient of that phone call at all, the thought enough to set her teeth on edge.

"No," he says, wobbly and faint, not looking her in the eye. He's got the fragile, wrung out look of somebody who would definitely be shaking if it weren't for the drugs in his system suppressing his body's instinct to try and keep itself warm. "No. Sorry."

"It's fine, really." Her voice is calm and professional, reassuring in a way she's cultivated over the years she's worked here.

"Sorry," is all he says again, and then he's trying to move, unsuccessfully attempting to shift onto his side.

Wordlessly, Brooke helps him turn and repositions the cooling blankets. His temperature, according to the readout, is coming down fast now, and they won't need them much longer, which is a relief. It had been seriously dangerous when he'd come in, dehydrated and delirious from hyperthermia. Now he seems at least calm, curled onto his side with his non-IV arm pulled up towards his chest. Mac's breathing is, however, Brooke notices with a slight frown, trembling in a way she doesn't think the benzodiazepines in his system can help with.

Soon enough, she has to leave because she gets paged that there's a new patient ready to admit to room three. A glance backwards when she reaches the door shows her the kid in the bed seems barely conscious again, drifting into what she hopes is some kind of restful sleep. It seems to her like he needs it, badly.

* * *

Mac isn't sleeping but he would prefer it if he were. He's cold and he wishes again that he had that hoodie with him, could wrap himself in soft, bright green fabric, the logo of a hockey team he couldn't name a single player of splashed over his chest like a habit you inherit from your parents. Over the last several minutes, he feels like he's come back to himself somewhat, but exists now in that in-between stage of being on medication - the regular kind that he doesn't have an adverse reaction to. It's that place where Mac is aware of what he's doing and saying but unable to keep the tight rein on it he usually does. It's the reason there are tears leaking slowly down his face now, causing the hospital-issue pillow under his cheek to grow damp.

It's the reason he hadn't been able to hold back the question, once he realized the person the nurses had called for him was not the person he so desperately wanted.

_Where's Jack?_

He can still hear his own voice, pathetic and thin and whiny, and the dead pause that followed before his father answered, asking, "Dalton? You had the hospital call me so you could ask me where _Dalton_ is?"

Not that Mac had meant for the hospital to call James at all, but that was entirely beside the point.

"He's not here," he'd said, words slipping out tripping over each other.

"Why would he be there?"

"Dad." It had been the only word he could find in his vocabulary to make it out of his mouth in the moment, a plea carried on a breath, and he can still hear the sigh that had rushed in a whoosh of air down the phone. The voice James had answered in had gone firm and patient in a way it usually didn't, not since Mac was young any way, the tone he'd always used to explain parts of the world Mac didn't understand or hadn't encountered yet.

"Look. Of course Dalton isn't there, and I'm not about to call him and tell him he's supposed to be. It's his job to keep you safe on missions. You're not on a mission right now and, since you ran yourself into heat stroke, you've been called off your assignment tomorrow. It's not his job to babysit you in the hospital or hold your hand when you get yourself hurt like this."

Mac hadn't been able to respond. Not until the nurse had already taken the phone. He told her no when she'd asked if there was anyone else to call, despite the deep, resonating loneliness. Even after she's left, Mac still isn't sure who he'd been talking to when he'd said 'sorry'.

Of course Jack isn't there. Mac remembers now what he hadn't been able to before, the reason there's a void beside his bed where his partner should be, would be and has been every time he's been hurt. He's Jack's job, in more ways than James knows. He's an assignment, a job, an informant, and imagining anything more is wishful thinking born of what an old partner had once disdainfully referred to as 'blatant daddy issues'. The anger at how soundly he's been used and deceived flares up again from this morning, but Mac is too tired to keep it alive, and it dies, until all that's left behind is confusion and hurt.

As the day wears on, Mac's temperature continues to wear down. They stop the medication, and his head clears most of the way up. By the time he's authorized to go home, it's fast approaching evening. Once he's strong enough, and sure he won't say anything he shouldn't, he calls Bozer to come pick him up.

It aches deep and guilty when he's able to tell the truth about what happened to him for once, and Bozer smiles a tight, plastic smile that says, as clear as if he'd shouted it, _I don't believe you._

* * *

Jack is distracted.

He's managed not to think about it for much of the day as he and Riley did drills on tailing and evasion. She's getting good at it too - he's been scaling down how easy he's taking it on her, and she keeps shaking him far before she should have, staying on him even though sometimes he slips into his training and uses a maneuver she's not supposed to be advanced enough to keep following through yet. If this keeps up, Riley is going to be one of the best tactical drivers Jack has ever seen, and the thought makes him glow warm with pride.

They're at a park now, taking a break, and Jack is supposed to be giving her a few more surveillance pointers, but he keeps checking his phone. Eventually, he realizes he was supposed to be talking, and the silence has grown long and pointed around him, and when he looks up, Riley is staring at him.

"It's Mac," he says in a sigh, answering her unasked question. "He won't answer me."

"Things are weird with you two," Riley tells him frankly, blunt and straight to the point. "I can feel it. What the hell is going on?"

"We got in a…" Fight isn't even the right word. Fight would imply Jack had taken some active part in it, or at least understood what was going on. So it hadn't been a fight But it also wasn't just another one of the moments where Jack steps wrong and accidentally comes up against some part of Mac he didn't know was raw and wounded, jabbed his sometimes-lacking tact into a hidden bruise. Those moments pass too quickly to hardly address them, like Mac is too embarrassed to admit they happened at all. This had been different. This, continuing out over days, _is_ different.

"So, what did he say, then?" is what Riley asks when Jack haltingly gets out as much of the story as he feels he's able to tell her. "Like, what were his exact words before he left the car?"

Jack is a trained operative whose memory is often relied on to keep them alive and more than that, he couldn't escape reliving that moment if he tried. He's been chewing on it night after night, searching for the moment things went wrong. So he recounts it for Riley, the odd anger that had surged in Mac and the words that had heralded its arrival.

_Sorry to disappoint you, Jack, but if you want to get a crack at him, then you're gonna have to do it some other way._

_Good luck finding someone else to answer your questions about the Director._

_Just _go, _Jack._

"He knows."

"What?" Riley's statement came so quickly and surely that it takes Jack by surprise, leaving him feeling half-winded.

"Our investigation. It's obvious. He knows. I told you he'd figure it out, and it sound to me like he just did."

Well shit. Maybe he'd figured that out himself too and just didn't want to admit it, because it makes everything so much worse, so much more complicated. Jack had wanted to be able to choose how to tell Mac, but he supposes that would've required him to figure out what he would've said or done in the first place, and now it's all blown up in his face and he doesn't know how to make it right.

Riley looks at him long and hard and says, as she gets up to throw the wrapper from her sandwich into the trash can and start back towards their cars, "You'd better figure that out. Getting him through this is going to take all of us."

She leaves for her meeting with Matty to go over some of her notes on the files, see if any of it will turn up anything when ran against that name Jack had heard at the end of the review. Jack himself starts off for home, pausing in his car to check his messages in the vain hope that maybe Mac has answered. There's no message from Mac, but to his surprise there is one from the Director. It's short and to the point, leaving him with more questions than he'd had before he read it.

_Your team is called off. Mission reassigned._

There's no reply when he texts back to ask for details, and Matty doesn't have any when he calls her either. Still nothing from Mac.

Guilt is turning into worry when he gets a phone call from Bozer, and he's back in his car speeding towards the house before his partner's roommate has finished saying 'heat stroke'. It's a new record for how fast he's gotten from his apartment to Mac's place, and he doesn't want to think about what kind of traffic laws he left in tatters behind him. Bozer is waiting out front when he gets there, arms folded across his chest, face twisted in a way Jack has hardly ever seen out of him. He looks worried, and on top of that, kind of pissed.

"Heat stroke?" Jack asks as he approaches down the walkway. "From a run?"

"That's what he told me anyway." It's immediately obvious that Bozer doesn't believe it, and Jack doesn't know whether to buy it himself. "I have to go, the class I'm TA'ing is tonight. I'd have just stayed, but he told me to just go, and he's not taking no for an answer. But I'm not leaving him by himself like this either. Do you have him?"

It's said in the same kind of bold, challenging tone Jack remembers from the day they met, almost verging on hostile in a way he hasn't heard out of Bozer in a long time. Rather than take any kind of offense at that, Jack instead nods, and says, "I've got him." He turns to go inside but is stopped when Bozer's voice sounds again.

"Hey."

Turning to look at him, Jack waits.

"Whatever the hell happened with you two, fix it." It's an order, from someone with no ground on which to be giving Jack orders, but is doing so anyway, and daring Jack to call him on it. "I haven't seen him like this since you got here and I don't like it. So whatever happened… Fix it. I'm serious." Without waiting for any kind of reply, Bozer whirls around and leaves, getting into his car and starting the engine.

Going feels not unlike walking into a minefield - and Jack would know. The house itself is quiet and empty, Mac found outside on the back porch, slumped in one of the wooden deck chairs they have out by the fireplace. He looks worn and sick and he's- Jack's breath catches in his chest when he sees what Mac is wearing. His legs, curled half up onto the chair with him, are clad in grey sweatpants, but what Jack is focused on is the sweater Mac is wearing. He's got Jack's Dallas Stars hoodie on, the vibrant green fabric serving to further wash out his ashen face, the Jack-sized garment just big enough on him to make him look that much smaller.

Once he remembers how to breathe, Jack walks over and sits down in the chair next to Mac's. For a long moment, he is very quiet and very still, breathing in the rapidly-cooling air in forcedly steady inhales and exhales.

"You're investigating him." The words are dull and resigned, almost completely toneless. Flat. Dead.

It's pointless to ask who Mac is talking about, and Jack just nods, clears his throat, and says as steadily as he can, "Yes. I am."

"You and Riley and Matty. You're investigating him, all three of you."

"Yes."

A longer, heavier silence. Jack risks looking to the side and sees Mac has curled tighter in on himself, that the hoodie, unzipped, is pulled around his chest, his hands gripping the edges and tugging it closer like he's trying to hug himself with it. It's enough to break a person's heart, looking at that, and Jack wishes he could take it all back. All of it right from the start, when Matty asked him to do this to begin with. As soon as he thinks it, though, he knows it's not true. This needs to be done. For Mac's sake more than anyone's, there was never any other way.

"It's okay to be mad at me," is what Jack eventually finds the strength to say. "I'd be mad at me. Hell, I _am_ mad at me."

"I'm not." It's quiet and sounds almost surprised when he says it.

"What?" Jack definitely is surprised, and not as reassured by that as he could be.

"I was, maybe. Tried to be. Thought I could be. But I'm not. I just- I just wish-" Mac laughs, wet and rueful, and Jack hopes it was actually a laugh and not the sob it sounded like it choked off into, halfway through. "I just wish you were a little less good at your job."

It's going to be a chilly night, the opposite of the excessively warm day that has landed them here to begin with, but that's got nothing to do with the cold that's settled into Jack's lungs, lungs that don't cooperate fast enough for him to say anything before Mac goes on, in that halting, hitching voice.

"It's the job, I get it. I'm the job. You're investigating the Director, my father, and you needed- needed information and I was the one you could get it from, so getting-" He stops like he's run out of breath, panting for a few empty seconds before starting again, Jack once more too slow to stop him. "Getting close to me was the best way to-"

The reality of what Mac is doing washes over Jack like someone has walked across his grave. Mac is rationalizing himself around the exact wrong conclusion, talking himself into understanding, logically and practically, that Jack had never cared about him at all, and had a good reason for lying and pretending he had.

"Stop it." Jack can't help saying it, impulsive and loud, and though he hates himself for the little flinch, the slight duck of Mac's chin down into the hoodie he wears, he couldn't stand to listen to any more of it. "You've…" Jack shakes his head, looking for what to say here, the magic words that will make it right. "You've got it so wrong I don't even know where to start, kid."

Now, Jack actually gets up out of the chair. This doesn't feel like a conversation for which he should be reclining. He crosses the scant space separating them and crouches down next to where Mac is still curled in his own deck chair, looking away. It gives Mac the high ground, something that may help him feel a little more in control here, and allows Jack to act on the instinct he's been feeling since he first set eyes on Mac, looking drained and fragile, the instinct to be close. He takes a deep breath, forces himself to stay calm, and starts talking.

"Matty asked me here because I was someone she could trust to help her figure out what was going on at DXS. We brought Riley on because we needed someone with her skillset that we could count on to keep things quiet. And yeah, we came to the conclusion that the most likely source of the errors that keep happening, the things that get overlooked, the miscommunications, all the stuff that's done or not done or done badly that keep putting you and everyone else in danger, is the Director."

His knees are starting to ache somewhat from his awkward position on the patio floor next to Mac's chair, but Jack isn't about to move. Not when doing so would put distance between them, in a moment where he can't afford to risk that. Not if he wants Mac to understand, to really hear him.

"Keeping you alive, that's my job with DXS. Investigating your dad, yeah, that's my job with Matty. But caring about you? _Taking_ care of you?" There's a faint stutter of the half of the hoodie logo Jack can see, the half not tucked under the other side, and Mac still won't look at him. Maybe can't.

There are precious few moments in life where you know you are at a turning point at the exact moment that you reach it. This is one of them. What Jack says next is going to have a massive impact on both of them, on the future of their partnership, and undoubtedly on Mac as a whole. He doesn't know what he's doing, can't figure out how to say this, and oddly finds himself missing his mother. Kathleen Dalton always seemed to know exactly what her children needed to hear when they needed to hear it, and Jack has no idea how she'd done it.

Jack wishes he could call her now, get her on the phone and ask her how she did it. He wishes he could hear her voice and tell her, _momma, I need your advice, see, I got a boy of my own now and he needs me, and I don't know what to do._ The thought washes over him, imagining saying to her, _I hurt him. I didn't mean to, and it couldn't have been avoided, but I did, I hurt him, and I don't know how to make it right. Please, tell me what to say to make it right._ But Kathleen isn't here, and Jack is, so he's going to have to try to make his own way through.

"None of that is a lie and none of it is a cover. Honestly, the rest of it would probably be easier if you meant less to me. I'd have told you sooner, for one, because I wouldn't have paid as much attention to what it was gonna do to you to find out, how it could hurt you."

Taking a risk, Jack pushes himself off the ground, knees aching as he stands. Mac flinches and curls tighter into himself, and even as he feels guilty and sick at the sight, Jack thinks maybe this could be a good thing. Teaching him that someone bigger and stronger than you didn't always have to be a threat could be a good thing. It could help teach him that sometimes it means something else. Still bracing most of his weight on the ground, unsure how much the chair could take, Jack props himself against the arm rest of where Mac sits, and keeps talking.

"I meant what I said, y'know." His voice is soft and carries easy over the still air. "When I was standing on that pressure plate. I don't regret you. The only thing about this I regret is that, because we couldn't tell you, you figured it out yourself and thought our investigation meant I was using you to get to him, that I didn't really care about you just for you." There's still one more thing left to say, maybe the most important thing. "I'm sorry, kid. This shouldn't have come out the way it did, but it did, and it hurt you, and I'm sorry."

Slowly, hesitantly, giving Mac plenty of time to pull away or indicate that he doesn't want to be touched, Jack reaches out. Mac, while obviously noticing, stays still and lets him, Jack's hand coming to rest on the side of his neck, holding on gently. It's a surprise when, in response to no directional force on Jack's part, Mac suddenly pulls himself over, sitting up and turning to face him, then leaning back against the other side of the chair. His head lands against Jack's side, above his hip, hand leaving the side of the Dallas Stars hoodie to tangle fingers in the hem of Jack's shirt.

For the space of a few surprised heartbeats, Jack doesn't so much as breathe. He stays perfectly still, then, noticing the hitching of the slumped shoulders, slides his hand up from Mac's neck to his hair, a light, protective hold. Incrementally, Mac starts to relax, until his body is limp, held up by the structure of the chair and by Jack, whose other arm drapes down to press a palm against his curved, shaking back.

"I'm sorry," Jack says again, barely above a whisper, bent down over the golden head braced against the bottom of his ribcage. All the strength has fled Mac, but one big, hard shudder runs through him anyway. Jack sweeps his thumb over Mac's hair, brushing the shell of his ear, a reassurance along with another apology, this one silent. At this point, Jack feels like he could almost collapse himself, guilt and worry present but paled in the relief that this hasn't broken them, that this inquiry into this toxic, dangerous man hasn't cost him something precious and irreplaceable.

"We're gonna have to talk about this tomorrow, okay? The investigation, and what it means," Jack says eventually, for himself as much as for Mac, a reminder they both need that this isn't over yet. He waits for the nod, the shifting of the face still pressed into his shirt, the ruffle of hair against his palm, before continuing, impossibly gentler, saying, "The reason I didn't get a phone call when my partner was in the hospital today." Another, more hesitant nod, like Mac had maybe thought Jack forgot about that - as if he ever could.

Right now, though, it can wait. Mac, though obviously weak and still sick, is in no immediate danger, and the investigation can be tabled, at least for tonight.

Above them, the first star of the night has struggled through the light pollution and industrial smog surrounding the heat island of Los Angeles. Jack looks up at it, that pinprick of glittering hope that's forced its way through near-insurmountable darkness, and makes a wish.


	35. While In The Fog And Still Afraid

_apologies for any logistical weirdness in this chapter - much as i am not a medical professional, neither am i an covert operative or an expert in international criminal organizations. also, let's all wave hello to my jewish riley headcanon, because as your resident fandom jewish friendTM, it is my obligation to get one in there whenever possible. now, onward!_

_(chapter title from radical face's song 'guilt')_

* * *

Things taken exactly as they were, Jack could have stayed there forever. He could have stayed exactly in that spot, perched on the arm of the deck chair on the back porch, Mac's head a warm weight against his chest, the boy's back rising and falling with deep, even breaths under his palm, for an honest as dirt eternity. Jack wonders if Mac can feel his own lungs expanding so acutely, where Mac's cheek is pressed against the bottom of his ribcage. It's peaceful and calm, quiet broken only by the faint, quiet sound of their breathing and the distant buzz of the life of the city around them, and being allowed to hold Mac like this, like the father Jack would swear out loud up and down that he isn't trying to be, is worth more than gold.

A thought crosses his mind, errant and fleeting as the meteor that streaks over the Western edge of the night sky, a flash of burning particles disappearing into the vast empty of space. One day, Jack wants to hug Mac just for the sake of it - and wants Mac to reach the point of being able to let him.

Including now, Jack has been permitted to do so on two, debatably three occasions, each of them stained in heartache. There had been the day he'd almost died standing on the Ghost's bomb and then felt like he was dying all over again, when Mac had cried so hard he'd nearly made himself sick, leaving wrinkles in the back of Jack's shirt with desperately grasping fingers. Then on the plane after Mac was given the drug he'd had such a bad reaction to, only Jack's arms around him keeping him upright. And now here, because the ugly secret Jack's been keeping from him is finally out in the open, and Mac had gotten himself thinking it meant their entire relationship has only ever been about James.

At no point has Jack been able to just… hug him. No memory exists of being able to touch Mac with the kind of protective, open affection that itches under the skin of his hands every time he looks at the kid, that isn't also tainted somehow. It only serves to make Jack that much angier, when he looks at James and can't find an ounce of the same fondness for Mac in him. He's looked for it, time and time again, and each time he comes up empty handed. Maybe, he's told himself in order to be able to tolerate standing in the same room as the man, the Director is just that good at compartmentalizing, at separating the child he adores from the agent he commands.

This thought has grown fainter and fainter, twisting and souring until Jack had seen the end of that review, and it died completely. The very thought of speaking to Mac like that, of saying something that could make him look the way he'd looked that night, cuts Jack to the bone. He doesn't care any more, Jack realizes, stroking his thumb gently over the back of Mac's golden head, how much James might think he loves the kid, if he does at all. No amount of whatever possessive selfishness men like James call love could ever make up for this.

Of course, like all moments, this one does not last forever. Eventually, Jack comes to the conclusion that it's time to go back inside. Mac is obviously weak and unsteady from his stint in the hospital, and he's started to either shiver or shake, just in the last minute or so. Jack isn't entirely sure which, and he's not really sure he wants to know, either.

"Come on, kid," he says, keeping his voice low and quiet, accompanying the words with a brisk rub of his palm over Mac's shoulders. "Time to head inside, yeah?"

The rest of the evening waiting for Bozer to get home from his class is mostly uneventful. The one hiccup comes as Jack is trying not to hover _too_ obviously, escorting Mac to his room so he can get some rest. As he's about to turn and reluctantly head back to the living room, to give his partner some space and the opportunity to fall into a much needed sleep, Mac's voice stops him, saying his name. When he turns around, Jack sees him sitting on the edge of the bed, hands fumbling with the now done-up zipper of the hoodie he's still wearing. Jack's hoodie.

"This is, uh," he's saying, cheeks just barely visibly pink in the dim light of the lamp on his desk. "This is yours, I should-"

"Why don't you hang onto it." Jack doesn't know why he says it, it just comes out, and as soon as he does, he knows it was the right thing to say. Mac's hands go still, one of them flattening out to press over the front, where the Dallas Stars logo sits square on his chest. He offers no protest, doesn't keep insisting on giving it back or trying to take it off, which means either he's even more exhausted than he'd seemed, or he really hadn't wanted to give it back at all. Either way, Jack is more than happy to let him keep it - it's not like he wears that particular hoodie very much in the first place.

This time, just as his foot crosses the threshold of the room out into the hallway, it's Jack's own thoughts that stop him. He looks back and asks the indistinct outline of Mac, laying on his side facing the doorway, "You really just went for a run, huh? That's all this was?"

Mac hums in response, followed a few moments later by one word, half-asleep and small, without a hint of deception or evasion. "Promise."

Most of the remaining time remaining before Mac's roommate returns to the house, Jack spends sitting on the floor of the living room, thumbing through and reading the backs of Bozer's massive DVD collection. He's too keyed up to watch anything, or to sit playing Candy Crush on his phone, so he fiddles with movies and dust jackets, opening the cases even to take a look at the designs on the disks themselves. When Bozer does get home, they don't talk much, a few brief words exchanged about Mac's condition, a thanks for coming to watch him, a soft rebuke that thanks are far from necessary for that sort of thing, and then Jack is leaving.

Until he isn't any more. There's one last thing he needs to do, one loose thread he can't bear to leave untied tonight.

"Hey," Jack says, stopping Bozer in his tracks just as he'd been about to close the door. There's a weariness in the young man's face that makes Jack's chest squeeze sharply, sympathy for the horrible back and forth of worry and suspicion he's trapped in because of his best friend's job stealing his breath away. He swallows hard, inhales slowly, and tells him, gentle and almost apologetic, "If it helps at all, he was telling the truth. It was just heat stroke. It was just a run."

Bozer doesn't respond right away. He stands there with his hand on the open door and breathes, shoulders rising and falling and giving the distinct impression they're carrying something unimaginably heavy. Eventually, with a faint smile at Jack, he says, "It doesn't. But thank you anyway."

As soon as Bozer leaves for work the following morning, Mac abides by what they'd agreed the night before and texts Jack to let him know. Jack then makes his way over, beating the time they'd agreed on with Matty and Riley by a little over an hour. They're going to tell him this together, lay out their case and hope that, between the three of them, they'll be able to find the words to help Mac understand not just what's happened, but what has to happen next. First, though, there's something else that Jack and he need to talk about, questions _Jack_ needs answered.

Which is how they've ended up here, Mac bunched up at one end of the couch, still looking paler than he should and not entirely steady, while Jack sits on an armchair turned to face him. Mac's looking down at his hands, fiddling with some attachment to his Swiss Army knife, and Jack figures it's now or never - he's been trying to figure out how to say this since he left the night before, and now he's just got to come right out and ask.

"What I need to know," Jack says, doing his best to keep his voice non-confrontational, measured, normal, "because I can't for the life of me work it out, is why I didn't find out my partner had been in the hospital until after he was released. And, on top of that, why I have the distinct feeling I _wouldn't_ have found out except for the fact that Bozer called me not wanting to leave you alone, knowing you wouldn't let him stay home from class to take care of you?"

Either Mac has been thinking about this as hard as Jack has, or the answer comes so instantly, so instinctively to him that he doesn't have to think about it at all, because he says without pause, eyes still on the corkscrew he traces the edge of with his thumb, "It wasn't relevant."

The words suck the air out of Jack's lungs. _It wasn't relevant._ They sound off and wrong and grate against him like the misshapen, jagged edge of a piece of metal, torn in a place it was never supposed to tear.

It hadn't made sense before, something that Riley had said to him sometime in the not so recent past. She'd tried to explain it to him, face twisted into a troubled frown, the way Mac talks sometimes and the way it sounds to her, like someone else's words are coming out of his mouth. Jack thinks he understands it now, because that didn't sound like Mac at all. It was his voice, but those weren't his words, and Jack has a suspicion, one that ignites something deep and snarlingly angry in him, that he knows who they belong to.

"I get that you were mad," he tries, swallowing down the monster his partner's father wakes up in him, wrestling it down until it's quiet once more - quiet but never gone. "And that's okay. I know you said last night that you aren't, but it's okay to be mad, but even when you are, these are the kinds of things I need to know."

"It wasn't because I was mad." Though he kind of sounds mad now, an irritated sharpness to the edge of Mac's words.

Jack would be lying if he said he didn't have at least something of a sneaking suspicion that it hadn't really been about that. _Relevant,_ Mac had said. He'd described his hospitalization by saying that it wasn't relevant, not that it was none of Jack's business, and though they're both wrong, they're very different statements.

"Then help me understand what happened here," Jack says. His hands are open wide, held out by his knees, like Mac might be about to physically hand him the answer. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I tried!" It comes out in a burst, Mac's eyes snapping over to lock onto Jack's for the first time in their brief conversation, bright and burning. He _looks_ angry, and it's impossible to tell who he's angry with, so Jack sits there and silently lets him be.

Jack had meant what he said, last night and just now, that Mac's anger was acceptable, was permissible, was allowed to exist and take up space. Even if that means the kid needs to yell at him, even if that means he's going to make this conversation ten times harder, if he needs to be mad, he gets to be mad. Honestly, Jack hopes it's him that Mac is mad at, because the alternatives are James - unlikely, and Mac himself - an option Jack doesn't like at all.

Shoulders heaving up and down once with a tremulous breath, Mac looks away after a long moment, shaking his head slightly and continuing, softer but no less off-balanced. "I tried to tell you, but I guess they didn't understand what I was saying, and they called the wrong person. My phone was at home, and I couldn't… They had me on this medication, I couldn't think straight enough to dial myself, and so I asked the nurse, and they called the wrong person."

Jack is confused, and it must show on his face when Mac's eyes flick briefly over to it, and away again. He gives another sigh, this one cut off short, and elaborates.

"I wasn't speaking coherently, so I think they misheard the name I said. Jack, James, they're not hugely different, and- and my dad is my emergency contact."

Now that sounds like a massively bad idea, but Jack figures they should probably have just one major conversation at a time. Besides, given everything else they're going to be talking about today, this doesn't seem like the appropriate moment to go hey, your dad has your best interests nowhere on his priorities list, you really ought to remove him from your medical file and you know what, go ahead and put me down instead. Though Jack does shelve that piece of information for later, when things have cooled down somewhat.

"They called him," Mac says, continuing. He's got the Swiss Army knife back in his hands, wire stripper tool pressed into the pad of his thumb. "I talked to him on the phone, it was…" He cringes, and the tool presses harder. Jack can see the way the skin around it has gone blanched and bloodless, and he'd be worried about Mac doing some kind of damage to himself if he didn't know that, from that angle, there isn't anything on it that's sharp. "The whole thing was stupid. It was all just stupid."

And there that monster is back again, roaring to life and bashing at the inside of Jack's ribcage, screaming to be let out to tear through the city until it finds James, until it rips the man's throat out. Jack shifts where he sits, discretely pressing his palm to his own side, like he can physically hold it back, and asks, quiet and thankfully calm, "What did he say to you?"

"It doesn't matter-" Mac starts, and Jack is having none of it.

"No, it does matter, see, because apparently whatever it was, you walked away from it thinking there could ever possibly be a time when you being in the _hospital_ isn't _relevant_ to me."

Whether it's Jack's refusal to let it drop, or the way he's thrown Mac's-but-not-Mac's own word back at him, it's hard to say, but Mac goes still. His cheeks have flushed deeper than they already were from the aftershocks of the heat stroke, the multi-tool closed and discarded on the couch cushion next to him. He just sits there for a few seconds, then shakes his head once, shallow and dismissive.

"Well it's not, like, you know." This is not how Mac is supposed to sound, Mac with the brain that runs a hundred and fifty miles an hour, Mac with the answers and the plans and the ability to do just about anything if he sets his mind to it. This is Mac not parroting someone else's words, but unable to find his own, thanks to a lifetime of conditioning refusing to let him, and a vocabulary that lacks the right words. "Technically, it's _not._ I had no reason to expect you to be there." _No right_ hovers behind _no reason,_ and Jack is talking before he's quite realized what he's planned to say.

"What about Riley?"

Looking up, frowning and bewildered by the sudden left turn in conversation, Mac makes a questioning hum in the back of his throat.

Uncowed, Jack goes on. "I'm just giving you a hypothetical here. Riley's in the hospital, are you gonna be there?"

"Of _course_ I would." He sounds a little upset at the implication, anger creeping back in around the edges, and the instant defense of this fact causes something hot and affectionate to throb in Jack's chest.

"Really?" he forces himself to push, leaning forward a little and bracing his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. "How about if it happened off the job? If she slipped and fell on an icy staircase or was in a car accident on her way to a Starbucks or sprained something trying to move furniture by herself?"

Now Mac is frowning in a completely different way, all hints of confusion gone. He leans back, snags the remote off the end table, fiddles with the side of the dark grey plastic casing. They're back once more to refusing to look at him, Jack notes, even as Mac says, "I see where you're going with this Jack, but-"

"But what?" Jack cuts him off for the second time in this conversation, and only feels mildly bad about it. "But it's different when it's you?" There's no answer. Mac bites his bottom lip and sits, tense as a tightly coiled spring, the remote making a slight clicking sound as he slides a tool from the knife into a seam at the side. "Why? What makes you different?"

The casing of the remote is cracked open now, the wires visible in a tangle of unfamiliar circuitry. Mac pulls at one of them, not seemingly for any reason, just tugging lightly at the connection. He's worrying at his bottom lip with his teeth and he's breathing harder than normal and, even more pronounced, Jack can see the tension in him, bunching his shoulders and straining his chest.

"You're not," Jack says. "You're not different. You exist outside of that building, outside of those missions. If I had known what..." He pauses to take a deep, steadying breath, to be able to speak around the sting in his throat without his voice cracking. They're here to deal with Mac's feelings, right now, not his own, not the way he'd nearly had a panic attack when he'd got Bozer's call, heard his partner's name, his boy's name in the same sentence as _hospital_ and gone through mugging stabbing car accident blood brain spine heart before he processed heat stroke and already home. "If I had known you were in the hospital, wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from there, you hear me? Half a sentence into that phone call and I'd have been out the door and on my way."

This time, Mac does answer. He says something quiet, too faint for Jack to make out, still looking down at the inside of the remote. When Jack asks, he just wordlessly shakes his head, and Jack insists again that no, seriously, he'd very much like to hear whatever that had been.

"I said," and his voice is low, embarrassed and hesitating on every syllable, "even if you were busy?"

It's almost funny, the way Jack has developed the ability to pinpoint these moments, the exact seconds in which this kid breaks his heart. And it happens again, when Mac keeps going, keeps asking those horrible, eviscerating questions.

"Even if there was a lot going on, and I literally did it to myself because I wasn't thinking? Even if I knew better?"

Jack has the distinct feeling that they're not talking about him any more. He answers as if they were anyway, because right now, Mac needs the man that cares for him, not the rage filled monster that hates his father.

"You could sit there and list 'even if's until the cows come home, and you're still not gonna find one that's gonna make me change my mind on this. Wild horses, Mac."

Staring at the guts of the remote, the exposed wires that shiver ever so slightly with the faint, barest shaking of his hands, Mac's lips move silently. _Wild horses_, Jack sees him mouth to himself, airless and awed. His entire demeanor is that of a nerve ending left exposed, the raw wound left behind when the dirt and grime has been rinsed clean. Then, all in one moment, he lurches back to himself, shutters in the same moment that he snaps the remote casing closed again. One of Mac's wrists comes up to scrub at his eyes as he takes a deep, sharp breath and mutters, "Thanks."

It marks the end of that conversation, and Jack allows it to be over there. He figures he's gotten through as far as he's going to in one morning, and they can't afford for Mac to be any more on edge or emotionally friable, walking into what's going to happen next.

When Matty and Riley show up, it's awkward at first. Mac tries to launch up off the couch to make coffee, but Jack tells him to "sit his fool butt down" and makes it himself, because if someone is going to mess around in the kitchen, it's not going to be the one who was hospitalized yesterday, thanks very much. Riley joins him to 'help', and stands next to the counter beside the coffee pot, fiddling with something. Jack can't help but notice, her fingers twisting around something hanging from her neck, and he glances over.

This is how Jack sees that she's wearing something he hasn't seen in years, and it makes his heart do a funny skip in his chest when he realizes the necklace she's anxiously playing with is the one he got her for her bat mitzvah, over a decade ago, when she was thirteen. It's a small bar of heavy, hammered metal, etched on one side with her name in English, _Riley_, and on the other side with her Hebrew name, letters Jack can't actually read himself but that form the name _Yocheved._ He knows they do because he ran it by Diane maybe a dozen or so times before he gave it to her, making sure he'd gotten it right.

Riley must have caught onto the fact that he's seen it, and quickly tucks it back under her shirt, glaring with only faint heat. Jack turns back to what he's doing without drawing attention to the necklace, something in him glowing and unsteady. It feels significant that she's wearing it, and he's going to get choked up if he thinks too hard about why.

Back in the living room, coffee distributed appropriately, things begin in earnest. They've brought all their materials to explain exactly what's going on with the investigation, what they've identified as their reasoning for thinking it's James responsible for what they've found. Mac has picked up one of the packets of paper and is thumbing through it, eyes skimming over the pages in a way that means he can't actually be reading any of the words on them, as he listens to them talk. They take turns talking, the explanation jumping from voice to voice as each puts their part in, hoping to build a picture he can understand.

"So," Matty says finally, when they've gotten through most of it, at least in broad strokes - the mistakes on the missions that Riley has begun to categorize into 'the stupid, the bad, and the dangerous', the miscommunications, the disconnect between departments and operatives, the way DXS is being held together by luck and a handful of department heads. "We had to look into everything we could, to see what's going on here. And it all keeps coming back to one answer, and that answer is the Director."

Mac is listening. He looks a little sick, and not in a way that can be explained by the heat stroke. Swallowing hard, he eventually says, "I see why you're thinking this, but it's not true. He's difficult, and different, and the way he does things is- yeah it could probably be better, but if there's something going on here it's not him. What about Warren?"

"Anthony Warren?"

At Matty's addition of the first name onto the last, Mac nods. "Yeah. He got pulled out of the exfil department after he got passed over for promotion three times. Dad tapped him as his assistant, I think he liked the way he took orders and didn't need, uh, babysitting, is how he put it. Maybe there was something wrong with him, something going on that people kept getting promoted over him, maybe it's him you should be looking at."

Glancing to the side, Jack exchanges a look with Matty, the same dubious concern in her face that he's feeling as well.

"We're investigating all avenues," Jack says carefully, "but the person who's responsible for this has power and access, the kind that you don't get when you're the director's assistant. Warren has his finger in a lot of pies, that's true, but not enough of them. He's connected to a lot, but not all of it, and not even the majority, and it goes too deep. Either we're looking at multiple people, which would have to mean another entire full-scale infiltration after the one last year, or it has to be the Director. I'm sorry, Mac, but there's no way around it."

While Mac is quiet, digesting this information, Jack studies his face. He watches the microexpressions flickering over it like an old-time film reel and remembers what he'd told Riley, back when she'd first balked at the idea of not telling Mac until they were sure, until they had more evidence. Because as soon as they told Mac, they brought the world as he knew it crashing down around his ears. And Jack can see the consequences now, the _this can't possibly be happening, no way, _bone-deep denial settling in before Mac opens his mouth again.

"You're right," is what comes out when he does, and Jack has just enough time to be blindsided by that before Mac goes on, and his heart sinks all over again. "Something is going on here, it has to be, but you're wrong about who it is. It can't be him. He just… he wouldn't. He couldn't. He's too smart, too good, he wouldn't make mistakes like this. There's another explanation. It's someone else, or he's being framed, or- there's another answer."

He puts the papers he's holding down, waves at the piles of them stacked in front of him. Riley had hoped that maybe by putting it physically in front of him, it could help him understand, help him grasp the enormity of it. The mountains of collated notes and color coded files, they contain the what, when, how, and who of the whole deep, ugly mess. Everything is there but that last, lingering question, the lynchpin of it all - why.

"Somewhere in here, there's another answer. Because it isn't him."

Matty can see Jack's resolve is cracking, and she can't blame him. He's gotten invested in ways she didn't predict or plan for, despite recruiting him in part because she knew she could trust him not only with the boy's physical safety, but his emotional wellbeing too. Matty had known from the word 'go' that Jack would care for Mac the way he needed someone to, she just hadn't known it would go this far, that she would see her old friend start to look so much like a father.

And then there's Riley, who's gotten deeply attached in her own way, slotting in next to Mac like two peas misshapen by pods not designed for them, mirror images of each other's warped edges. She's just a kid herself, and she's already juggling more than she ever should've been asked to. In her life before this, she may have been in prison, she may be a genius and a criminal and a hundred other things, but Riley got recruited, she didn't sign up for this.

So this part, the part where they have to push Mac, to see if he'll snap in a way they can't afford and tip their whole hand, is the part Matty needs to step up and do herself. Someone needs to say it, and she needs to be the one to do so, because it would be unfair and cruel to ask either Jack or Riley to.

"I understand where you're coming from," she tells Mac, and it's true. She does. It's an impossible situation that he's been put in, and Matty resents her boss more than she ever thought was possible. "I get that this is all very hard to take in. But I need to be sure that, no matter if you believe us or not, or about what, that you're not going to take this to your father. I need you to give me your word that you'll protect the integrity of my investigation, wherever it takes me."

To be completely honest, Matty has no idea what she's going to do if he refuses. This entire conversation is a gamble on the hope that he won't, that some part of Mac, even if he can't consciously acknowledge it yet, sees the writing on the wall. Or, barring that, that he'll understand what he's risking for them if this makes its way back to James.

Mac nods stiffly. "I won't breathe a word," he says. There's a hollow, distant tone to his voice that Matty finds concerning, but his eyes are steady on hers. "You're not going to find it. Whatever proof you think you're going to get on him, it's not there. But he'll have you all so fired the scorched earth will keep you from working intelligence ever again if he even comes close to finding out, so I'll go along with this. But I won't help you."

Satisfied that he's telling the truth, Matty nods and thanks him. It's a start. At the very least, it's a start.

The office is as quiet as it ever gets when she returns to it. She's left Mac home under the watchful eye of Jack while she went back in, promising to call with updates regularly. There's a rather odd objective on her plate for the rest of today. James is off-site somewhere, chasing down a lead for some project he won't tell her about, so she has the run of the place to herself. Well, herself and Anthony Warren, who, last she saw, was on a wild goose chase trying to get ahold of the head of IT about some intel issue. This leaves Matty with plenty of time for her own personal project.

The team of the mission she's monitoring is already on the ground in Bosnia, approaching the next identified base of Simon Halilovic's semi-nomadic arms dealing operation. They'd elected to send Mac, Jack, and Riley due to the former two's previous experience with Halilovic, on the assignment in Croatia shortly after Jack was hired. It was a pretty easy decision that the people with previous exposure to the group would be best equipped to deal with them again, especially given the dust-up that went down at the end of that particular mission.

However, given Mac was hospitalized more recently than the minimum twenty-four hour post-discharge policy allows for, that's obviously off the table. James reassigned them yesterday, and Matty didn't find out until she got a text from Jack asking her if she knew why. Which leaves a different team headed to Halilovic's new hideout, to install the same kind of surveillance equipment that Mac and Jack had been sent to remove, all those months ago some twenty miles from Zagreb. Partially because of this last minute reassignment, partially because she just has an odd, unsettled feeling about the whole affair, Matty has chosen to monitor the progress of the mission closely, and has recruited Riley to help her.

Presently, she sits at her desk, watching a live feed of the transcription from the sector of IT devoted to monitoring comms chatter scroll across a tablet. Not much that's interesting has happened so far, just a lot of small talk between Agents Paiz and Luther. In all likelihood, they will get in, install the needed equipment, and be on the plane home before the sun rises the next day. There's no need to delay the return any longer, once they've verified the equipment is working. The timeline on this one is rather short, too, because the next day the Halilovic operation has a meet scheduled with their first contact to come to their new location, and the Director had wanted them out before that happened, something about risking showing their hand if they stuck around.

Something about this thought, Matty absently going over the timeline as a line of text displays a comment from Luther to Paiz about, of all things, literally the weather, jars her out of her half-bored haze. She looks sharply up from the tablet over at Riley, who is doing some data mining on the chatter in the area, seeing if there's anything they should be worried about.

"Does your file have anything on the group that's meeting with Halilovic tomorrow?" she asks, though she already knows the answer. Matty made the file herself. There's still the chance that she'd forgotten a section, slim though it may be, and that chance is dashed when Riley lifts the cover of the folder with one fingernail, and shakes her head.

"No, should it?"

Matty frowns, not answering, and Riley sits up from where she'd been lounging on her back on the couch in the Deputy Director's office, legs thrown up over the arm-rest. It was a terribly unprofessional way to sit, but Matty figured she'd let it slide after the day they'd both just had, and given nobody else was around to see it. (It didn't hurt that she's quickly developed a massive soft-spot for the kid, though far be it from her to let that become public knowledge.)

"Matty, what's going on? Who is Halilovic meeting, why does it matter?"

"It matters," Matty says as she begins shuffling digital files around, searching for the initial intel report that they'd gathered on the new location, including the note about the meet the next day, "because every piece of information you do or don't have on a mission could mean the difference between life or death. Yours, your partner's, some person walking down the street."

"I thought they were supposed to be out before the meet anyway?"

Distracted by sifting through information, looking for the line that will contain what she needs, Matty takes a while to answer the question. "They are. But we still need to- Oh _damn_ it."

"What?" Now Riley sounds alarmed. She's gotten up from the couch completely and walked over to the desk, sitting on the chair across from Matty's. "What's going on?"

"It's Excelsior."

"What's Excelsior?"

Instead of answering, Matty puts the tablet down and gestures towards the computer Riley has been working on. "In your monitoring of the area, did you see anything about kidnappings? Ongoing investigations, recent?"

"Uh." Riley snags her rig off the low table by the couch, squinting at the screen. She clicks a few keys, and then says, "Two."

"Either of them American nationals?"

"...Yes, actually." Flicking off the screen, Riley's confused eyes land on Matty, before returning. "Zachary Wright, twenty, an American college student from Peoria, he went missing two days ago. Family got a phone call, but no ransom demand yet. How did you know that?"

"Because Excelsior is a terrorist ring known for extortion kidnappings of young Americans abroad. And we should've been scanning for abductions the instant we knew they were involved with Halilovic and coming to the area." Moving quickly, Matty leaves her chair and rounds her desk, heading for the door. She needs to speak to Agents Paiz and Luther as soon as possible, and can only do that from a mission control room connected to comms. Behind her, she hears Riley scramble to follow.

"This is why we need to have all the information," she says over her shoulder as she walks as fast as possible down the hallway. Matty would feel bad about near-snapping at the girl when certainly none of this is Riley's fault if it weren't for the forty-five other things pinging through her brain at the moment. "It's a complete gamble on whether a paid ransom will guarantee a return of the victim, literally an almost fifty-fifty split. They're exactly the kind of world-class nightmare we're monitoring Halilovic to catch, but we can't wait for monitoring. If we leave the area before that meet, Zachary Wright is as good as dead."

The entire objective has shifted. She no longer cares about surveillance equipment - there would be plenty of time for that later. What she cares about is a twenty year old boy going home to his parents and his college dorm room.

Matty doesn't care if this wasn't the mission as it was set out. She doesn't care that she's likely to be in for an unholy argument with the Director when he gets back - in fact, she's about ready to kick his teeth in as soon as look at him, right now. It's as clear as day in Matty's mind, what he'd say - _We weren't to know it mattered who Halilovic was meeting, his group deals arms. Any civilian threat comes after the fact, we can't be expected to predict every eventuality, and there's no way I could've known there would be some kind of hostage involved. If anything like that came up, we ought to be able to trust our agents to handle it._

In a stroke of luck, they catch Paiz and Luther before they get too deep into the equipment setup, and they are able to abandon the objective with ease and without leaving behind evidence that they were there. The combined efforts of Matty and Riley home in California, and Paiz and Luther on the ground in Bosnia just outside the capital city of Sarajevo, are enough to, with a relative degree of certainty, pinpoint the location they're likely holding their captive. From there, it's a matter of waiting with held breath while they execute an unplanned rescue mission, getting in and getting out as quickly as they can with minimal time to prepare and entirely the wrong equipment.

Not until she hears Agent Paiz's voice over comms, elatedly telling them, "Home base, this is Paiz, we're out and we've got the kid," does Matty feel like she can breathe again.

She congratulates Paiz and Luther on a job well done, agrees that the U.S. Embassy will likely be the safest place to take Zachary, and ends the transmission. Matty sits heavily down on the couch, knees weak after the release of tension that's been gripping her even before she put two and two together and identified Excelsior. Riley looks similarly exhausted, and Matty calls her name softly, getting her attention.

"You did good," Matty tells her, and is rewarded by the relieved grin that breaks out over Riley's face. "Today, with Mac, and with this just now, you did good. Jack was right to bring you on, you're an asset to this team."

And if Riley suddenly thinks of another thing she needs to add to her notes on what just happened, opening her computer and hiding her face behind it, Matty's not going to point out the deep, pleased blush she'd noticed just before.

The next day, when the frantic call comes through, it isn't Paiz's voice this time, it's Luther's. She's babbling down the line so fast Matty has to ask her to slow down twice before things start making sense.

"-on the news," she's saying, high pitched and still rushed, "you'll see it, I don't know how this happened, we had him, he was out, we _had_ him."

Heart turned to a frozen block of ice in her chest, Matty fumbles for her tablet, switching it on and opening the first news channel live stream she can locate. And there it is, blue and red and white blaring in alarm, _BREAKING NEWS_ splashed across the page before cutting to a solemn-looking anchor.

"We have just received word," the man on the screen says soundlessly, his words displayed in subtitles below his face, "that missing American college student Zachary Wright has been killed. His body was found outside Sarajevo, Bosnia-"

"I handed him off to the man at the Embassy myself, he was _fine,_ he was shook up but he was _fine,_ the Embassy man said he'd- they'd- And then Paiz got this _call_ and it was this computerized voice and an address and there he was on the ground, there was blood everywhere I- there was nothing we could-"

"Slow down," is all Matty can think of to say. She's reeling, mind spinning. Nothing about any of this makes sense. If their agents had passed the kid over to the Embassy, he should've been okay. Excelsior operates in back alleys and nightclubs, they don't take risks like that. They wouldn't break into an Embassy just to re-kidap a mark that was already rescued. "You did everything you could. This isn't on you."

"There's something else." At least this time, Luther's shaking, distraught voice has slowed and steadied enough to be clearly comprehensible. It's the least reassuring thing she possibly could have said, and Matty's heart stutters through a few frozen beats. "Local authorities were on the scene so fast we could hardly- but there's one thing. He had something stuffed in his hand, like it was put there after- after he- It was a message. A message for us."

"What did it say?"

"It was just one sentence, it wasn't signed, looked handwritten. It just said," Luther clears her throat before continuing, reciting, "It said to, 'Tell MacGyver that next time, he better show up himself.'"


	36. Wield An Iron Fist

_this chapter's title is from jaymes young's 'i'll be good'. hope everybody is staying safe, and that this helps pass the time._

_warnings: large focus on the death of the 20 year old civilian mentioned the last chapter, and how badly mac is taking that. also features a panic attack._

* * *

For now, it's a waiting game. Matty sits at her desk in her office, having just gotten off the phone with Director MacGyver notifying him of what's taken place, and waits. He's on his way back from wherever it was he'd taken off to, and Mac and Jack are headed in as well, but until either party arrives, there's not much Matty can do any more. The silence of the room is broken only by the sound of footsteps and the occasional hum of distant conversation outside in the hall, and the click of Riley's laptop keys.

Matty knows there are things she could do to occupy herself, reports she could review, slow-burn distance operations she could check in on with IT, exfil evaluation reports submitted for the bi-annual review of the department, but she can't bring herself to do any of it. All she can do is sit at her desk and watch the door, waiting. Every so often, her attention is drawn to Riley, giving the girl on her couch a once-over to be sure she's still coping.

She'd been devastated when she found out. Matty had called her in and closed the door and explained, as calmly and plainly as she could, what had happened to Zachary Wright. Riley's face had crumpled before her eyes, knees going out as she dropped onto the couch hard and final as a stone through the glass surface of a still lake, and hasn't moved since. She got her computer out at some point, though Matty doesn't know what she could be doing. Every so often a glimpse of the screen is visible, and it's just a blue background and white text, strings of numbers and letters that likely wouldn't make a lick of sense to anyone aside from the person writing them.

In all honesty, Matty is glad she'd had the chance to tell Riley first, alone and before the rest of her team. It was something of a trial run for the likely much harder version of this conversation, the one where she'll have to tell two of her field agents that, on the mission they were supposed to be on, a civilian had been shot dead and, in all likelihood, it seems the motivation was the substitution of teams. Though Riley had taken it hard, understandably so, she wasn't the one targeted by the note, the one implied to be the reason Zachary Wright lost his life. If telling Riley was hard, Matty can only begin to imagine what her conversation with Mac is going to look like.

On the phone, she hadn't provided any details. She'd only told them there was an update about the mission, because they'd asked her to keep them informed of what's going on, but she didn't tell them what that update was. Nothing was said about the discovery of the international kidnapping ring Excelsior's involvement, the rescue mission that followed, or the subsequent death. That kind of information, Matty has long since determined, is not the kind that should be delivered over the phone, if there is any way to avoid doing so.

A soft buzzing sound alerts her to a message that's just come through on her phone. Matty picks it up and reads it over quickly, the puts the device back down without answering. It's a status update from exfil team Victor Bravo, updating her on what time they should arrive with agents Paiz and Luther. This does actually provide Matty with the realization that there _is_ something she needs to do now, and she picks the phone back up. She needs to have resources in place for their debrief upon return, including making sure that they have psych on staff. This mission has concluded more brutally than most, even those where a life is lost, and Matty can remember with all too sharp a clarity exactly how Luther had sounded telling her what had happened.

It feels like she's hardly gotten all of this sorted when her assistant is knocking on the door, alerting her to the arrival of Mac and Jack. The Director is still en route, as are Paiz and Luther, so she can put those pieces of the massive juggling act that is this job aside for the moment, in order to focus on delivering this message in a straightforward way that is as kind as it's possible to be.

"Guys, you're going to want to sit down for this," she tells them, and the tone of her voice cuts off any joke Jack might have been about to make about the cliche she's just dropped.

Matty keeps herself calm and measured, with a soft edge to her words, while she tells them that the mission was overall a success.

"We discovered, before Agents Paiz and Luther got too far in, that the kidnapping ring Excelsior was involved with Halilovic and in the area." She can tell from the look on Jack's face that he at least recognizes the organization, likely having encountered them in his work before DXS. "Upon learning this, we identified that they had a victim in captivity at the time, an American college student named Zachary Wright."

Riley's hands have gone still on her keyboard, the empty space left behind where the fast, rhythmic clicking had been loud and wide. Judging now by their expressions, Mac and Jack haven't heard the news. They're not saying anything or asking any questions, and Matty thinks they've put it together, given context clues, but she still knows she has to say it. A friend of hers who went to medical school recounted once how they were taught that in order to understand it, people need to hear the words. Euphemisms and meaningful silences in which to put it together for yourself don't work. The words need to come out, honest and open.

"The victim," Matty says, hoping that small amount of cold distancing will help her somewhat to be able to continue without her own voice cracking, without betraying how affected she is herself by this last minute, incomprehensible tragedy, "was rescued by Paiz and Luther. He was then delivered to the United States Embassy in Sarajevo where he was handed off to what was believed to be an embassy employee." Mac's forehead twitches, and she knows he caught it, the specificity of her language. "We were notified the next day by our agents, right as it broke in the news cycle, that Zachary Wright had been killed, and his body found just outside city limits."

Mac makes a sound like he's been stabbed. It's a gutted, wet huff of air, empty, and Jack is the one who asks.

"What _happened?_ What the hell happened, Matty, if he was already at the Embassy, I-"

"The man who took custody of Wright at the Embassy had credentials that identified him as Elias Dermott," Matty says, an ache in her chest when she says the name, knowing what is coming next. "Elias Dermott was found dead shortly before the discovery of Wright's body, and the running theory between Agents Paiz, Luther, and myself is that the man who met with them was not the real Embassy employee, but rather someone who had killed him to assume his identity and intercept the handoff. We don't know who it was, just that it was unlikely this man was associated with Excelsior. It's not their handiwork, they don't operate with that kind of risk."

"Why then?" Jack is shaking her head as he asks it, and Mac is still silent, staring past Matty's head at some nondescript spot on the office wall. "If they weren't Excelsior, and they weren't working with Simon Halilovic either-" He pauses for confirmation, and she nods. "Then why murder some random American kid? It doesn't make sense."

Above all others, this is the moment of this conversation that Matty has been dreading the most. "There's something else," she says, parroting what Luther had told her. Riley looks up for the first time in a long time, shooting Matty a dismayed look, but they have to know, and Matty has to be the one to tell them. Even if it was morally or practically acceptable to keep this information to herself - the message too close to a threat to keep it quiet, and she unable to stomach the idea of doing so - she knows that James wouldn't hold back. They, Mac especially, deserve to hear it from her. At least if it's her, Mac will be able to react.

"There was a note in Wright's hand when he was found, put there presumably by the person who killed him," she says, even softer than before. She wants to hesitate, to give herself and Mac both more time before this information is out and can't be taken back, but that would only prolong it and wouldn't be fair to anyone. "It was handwritten and not signed. It read 'Tell MacGyver that next time, he better show up himself.'"

Jack couldn't have possibly described what he thought Matty was going to say when she started talking about the note they found with the dead boy's body, but what actually comes out of her mouth is so far out of left field it takes his brain a second of lag to process what it is. When he manages to digest what she's said, his head whips immediately to the side, because much as he feels like he's just taken a bullet in the vest, he can't imagine how this is hitting Mac.

Not well, it would seem. Mac is staring at Matty with wide, too-bright eyes, frozen so still it's visible to Jack that he isn't breathing. Then, there's a small, hitched gasping sound as he starts to again, chest shuddering out in a deep, abrupt inhale, devolving quickly into near-hyperventilation. Before Jack can say anything to him, before Matty can get farther than saying his name, Mac is up and out of his seat, and headed for the door.

Before Jack can follow him, there's one question he needs answered. There's one worst-case scenario for where he could find Mac when he goes to track him down, and if it's a possibility, he needs to know now.

"Is he here?" Ordinarily, Jack would feel bad for the abrupt way he asks the question. Not this time. "Is James MacGyver in this building?"

"No," Matty tells him, unphased. "He's offsite, won't be back for over two hours. Go."

That's all the cue Jack needs, and he goes. He leaves the office, looking around hopefully, but he's out of luck there. Mac didn't stop when he left Matty's office, didn't sit down on a bench in the hall or wait for Jack, who he'd had to know would be right behind him. So Jack starts looking. Mac isn't anywhere to be found in any of the usual spots on the main floor, and it's a short list of places later that he decides to head down to Research.

When he reaches their lab, Bonnie Whittacker and Peter Tam are both there. They're in the middle of a conversation when he walks in, but stop dead when they see him, both looking at him with the kind of blatant, irritated stare you turn on someone who has just rudely barged into your conversation.

"Have you seen Mac?" he asks, and when they both shake their heads, he curses sharply, turning to go.

"Did something happen?" To Jack's surprise, it's Whittacker's voice that stops him. She's the quieter of the two, barely speaks when he's around. He'd started out assuming that, of the two of them, it was Tam who tolerated him to a greater degree, but after they had more cause to encounter each other and semi-bond over their mutual proximity to Mac, he'd grown to understand she was just like that. Just shy. But now she's standing up out of her chair, arms folded across her chest, frowning at him, and asking, "Is he okay?"

"We got some news," is all Jack can think of to tell her. "Some really bad news. He bolted."

Tam is looking back and forth between them, face confused and a little impressed, and Whittacker nods. She looks contemplative, hesitating for a moment, and Jack doesn't have time for this.

"If you know where he is, Bonnie," it's a risk using her first name when they aren't close, they don't really know each other like that, but Jack has to try, hoping maybe it will persuade her to see how sincere he is, how badly he needs her help, "you have to tell me. Please, I need to find him."

For just a moment longer, Whittacker stands there watching him. Behind her, for once, Tam says nothing, letting his quiet labmate take the lead. Eventually, whatever she was hesitating for must have fallen in favor of deciding he needs to know, because she tells Jack, "The roof. Try the roof."

How she knows to check there or why she wouldn't just tell him is anyone's guess, and Jack doesn't have the time to stand around trying to piece it together. Instead he hurriedly thanks them both and leaves, taking the stairs two at a time to the very top of the building. He reaches the roof access door in record time, thankful that his work badge has high enough clearance that it lets him through the door. Breathing a little heavily from having bolted up several flights of stairs, Jack slows down once he gets a good look at what's going on outside.

Mac is sitting on the ground, a ways away, back propped against some kind of large, shed-like box presumably containing control paneling and equipment. There's a light wind this high up, ruffling his shaggy blond hair, and he's got a tablet in his hands, looking at something on the screen and scrolling slowly. Jack takes a moment to just look at him, to let the sight of his partner, whole and physically unharmed, calm the racing pulse in his neck. After giving himself enough time to come down off the instant high of panic that arrived faster that it might have normally, had they not had so many scares with Mac so quickly in recent days, Jack walks over.

The only sign that Mac has any recognition that Jack has walked up to him and is now sitting carefully down beside him, is a slight flinch, his eyes closing briefly and his body seizing up. He doesn't move after that, attention not leaving the screen, and he doesn't say anything, so Jack thinks it's safe to assume he's at least identified the person now sitting down on the ground next to him. If it was someone else, he'd likely have bolted again, but he's still, except for the finger dragging across the tablet's screen.

Following Mac's lead and not saying anything either, Jack decides that, for right now, the best course of action is to let him be and give him what space is possible while not losing sight of him. From this vantage point, Jack can actually get a look at what's displayed on the device in Mac's hands, so he focuses on that. He squints down, and when he figures out what it is, Jack's heart gives a small, wrenching throb. _Oh, Mac, kid…_

Zachary Wright's Facebook page looks like the Facebook page of any random college kid in America. Mac has scrolled far past what Jack would assume are the recent influx of posts from friends and family regarding his sudden, shocking death, and the screen is full of University of Chicago banners, snapshots of an elderly black labrador retriever, and meme posts with a handful of names tagged. Mac's scrolling pauses, stopped on a selfie of Wright and a girl, both of them grinning and wearing Cubs hats. He breathes audibly in short, whistling pants, and then he's talking, quiet and hollow.

"His twenty-first birthday is in a couple of weeks," he says. Jack wants to tell him to stop, but can't, frozen by the wounded tone of Mac's voice, the light glinting off his wet cheeks. "He's got two sisters and he was allergic to strawberries. He was going to school for anthropology and he posted a lot of really bad pictures he took on hikes. He was a _person,_ with a life and a family and a future, and now Mary Anne and Caleb Wright are going to get their son back in a box with two bullets in him. They lost their son and those girls lost their brother and all of these people…" He flicks down the Facebook page again, faces and names flashing past, countless pictures and posts. "They lost their friend and their coworker and their classmate, because- Because I-" And he can't finish, the word choking off as Mac looks sharply away.

It hurts in a way Jack can't describe, when he realizes that Mac is holding his breath, suffocating his own crying before it can escape him, smothering pain and guilt under heavy, still silence.

"You didn't do this," is all he can think of to say. Mac's shoulders jerk once up and down, breathing in, out, unsteady and stifled. "There's nothing you could've done if you had been there. It happened after he was handed over to the Embassy, you know what Luther and Paiz reported. They're good agents. They did their jobs and it was out of their hands, and it would have been out of _your_ hands if it had been us on the ground in Sarajevo."

"You know what the note said," Mac shoots back, the acidity of his voice undercut by the failing strength of it. "I didn't do it, but they did it because of me. To send a message to me."

"There are two of you running around here, it could have easily meant him." Jack has to point it out, even though he knows before Mac starts pushing back on the idea how unlikely it is, given the circumstances, that the note could have meant James.

"He's not an active field agent," points out Mac, still looking away. One of his hands comes swiftly up from the tablet to push at his cheeks, sleeve clearing his face of any hint he'd been crying. It's not much use, given another tear streaks down a few seconds later. Mac ignores it, going on to say, "He wasn't assigned to the job, and the case he's chasing is… it doesn't fit. It's out of pattern for this."

It's yet another piece of information for Jack to file away to reference later, other priorities winning out just now. He can worry about the implications of whatever case the Director is chasing later, when he's not triaging his partner.

"Okay, so let's say it does mean you." The instinct to stop, to take it back and apologize, rears its head and sinks its teeth into Jack's spine, and he ignores it. He shoves it violently down, because despite the look that crashed across Mac's face just now, he has to hear this. "Let's say some- some rando decided to kill this kid to send a message to you. There's still nothing you could've done to stop them. If Wright was killed to get to you, it could've just as easily been meant for you in person. Maybe if we'd gone, he'd still have died and the message would've been worded different. We have no way of knowing. Nothing could have prevented this 'cept the bastard who killed him deciding not to, and I'm not gonna sit here and listen to you destroy yourself over it."

The Facebook page is still pulled up, held in Mac's shaking hands while he looks down at it, and he's back to not talking. There's an odd shine on the surface, and it's when Jack realizes that a tear has rolled down Mac's face, dripped from his jaw, and landed on the tablet that he makes a decision. He can't stand to watch this, not any more. Jack reaches over and takes it, grateful when Mac lets it slip out of his grasp easily and without protest.

Once he's set the tablet off to the side, Jack wraps an arm around Mac's shoulders, hand coming to rest at the side of his neck, the same place it had lain that day in the cemetery, when he'd introduced Mac to his dad. The day he'd learned the story behind the scar under his palm, the one he runs his thumb over gently now. He wonders if Mac is thinking about that alley in Sweden, how much the kid is empathizing with what Zachary Wright must have felt in the last moments of his life. Mac had been barely older than Wright when he'd been shot and left for dead in Stockholm, alone in a strange place, when he should have been safe, protected.

"There's nothing you could have done to save him," Jack says, low and close to Mac's ear, "and I'm so, so sorry."

Mac doesn't answer, either to accept or reject the absolution, but there's a slight pressure as he leans into Jack's touch, and that has to count for something.

James hasn't been at the office long before he summons Mac to his office to speak to him alone. When he walks in, James has a tablet not unlike the one Mac had been using to look at the dead boy's Facebook page set out on his desk. There's an image pulled up, a scanned and enlarged photo of the note Matty had told him about, scratched in pen on a crumpled piece of white, bloodstained paper. The Director doesn't say anything at first, studying something on his phone when Mac enters, and Mac doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing here, or if the picture on the desk is something he's supposed to react to.

Generally speaking, the worst case scenario is usually a good place to start with James, and so Mac goes there first, and says, "I'm sorry."

And now James is looking at him, phone down and eyebrow up, waiting with a question he doesn't ask out loud, forcing Mac to guess and try and answer anyway.

"If I hadn't gotten myself stuck in the hospital on that run," he says, forcing his voice to keep steady even as he very much doesn't want to think at all about that event, "then I would've been on the mission as I was supposed to be. I wasn't, and I-"

"Are you _really_ making this about you right now?" The exasperated snap breaks through Mac's attempt to castigate himself sufficiently for what he'd assumed James was upset with him over, and Mac, startled, falls immediately silent.

Apparently, this meeting isn't about being in hot water for his hospitalization and everything that followed, though what the alternative is, he has no idea. He doesn't have to wonder for long.

"Walsh is sending me messages using murdered college kids and you're making this about _you?"_

It's enough to completely wipe out anything Mac had been about to say, in favor of the completely baseless assertion James has just made, and he asks, impulsive and unintentional, "Walsh?"

"Who else would target me like that?"

Mac is coming to the very rapid conclusion that James believes he knows exactly what happened in Bosnia and exactly who they have to thank for it, and the entire thing makes him deeply nervous. It's far too soon to be making any kind of conclusive judgement on who's done this, given the unsigned note and the lack of anyone coming forward to take credit, and Mac thinks he's wrong additionally about which one of them was being targeted. Not that James seems to want to hear any of this, going on quite the monologue before Mac finally finds a concrete point to bring up.

"The note was addressed wrong," he says and James looks over at him, frowning.

"What do you mean, addressed wrong?"

"I mean," Mac turns the tablet to face his father, pointing at their shared last name, the spiky M that begins it, "did he ever call you that? Did Walsh call you 'MacGyver'?" It's a moot question. Mac knows he didn't. He knows, from the bits and pieces of stories he's heard over the years, coming out in moments where James's rants about his former best friend went from angry to wounded before he shuttered completely.

The note is addressed wrong because Walsh had never called Mac's father 'MacGyver'. He'd always called the man 'Jay'.

Without waiting for any kind of response, Mac tries his luck and pushes harder. "And is this his style, his kind of message? Why now, and why the theatrics? Why leave it unsigned and make you wonder when he could take credit for it, if he knew you'd figure out it was him anyway? This doesn't sound like him, sir, you know it doesn't. We've both been chasing him long enough to know this isn't how he does things."

"People change," James says stiffly, turning away. It had been a risk to bring up any personal aspect of his and Walsh's relationship, the history they shared. Pointing out that the full last name on the note is so different than the personal nickname he'd used to refer to James when they'd known each other, while making a good point, seems to have pushed James somewhere Mac should've known better than to take him, given what he goes on to say. "People change and _partners_ change, Angus, which is something I've tried to teach you. Unsuccessfully, evidently, and speaking of, you're starting to get way too close to Dalton."

Mac shakes his head. Something about the assertion stings in an unexpected way, makes him want to turn around and leave the room, not come back. Instead he just does his best to ignore it and focus on the problem at hand. James seems to be less keen on dropping the topic, now that he's noticed Mac's response - or lack thereof.

"I'm serious," he says, stepping around the edge of the desk to stand in front of his son, though still several feet away. "It's making you drop your guard, you're leaving yourself defenseless."

"Jack's a good person," Mac can't help but say, protesting against the implication in James's warning. (He can still feel Jack's hand on the side of his neck, warm and protective, strong without the barest hint of a threat. It had been odd that he'd showed up at all when no one had ever followed Mac up there before, when he'd been sure no one even knew he went up there at all save the time he'd offhandedly mentioned it to Whittacker, told her it was a good place to go if she ever needed to get away from the busy, keyed-up energy of the office.) "I don't need to defend myself from him, he wouldn't ever-"

He doesn't get any farther than that before James interrupts, loud and sudden, "And that's exactly what I would've said, would've ssworn up down and sideways, about Jonah, right up until I _knew better."_ It hangs in the air between them, the rise in his voice and the name he never uses, personal and bitter and hurt, _Jonah._

James stands there and stares at him with a fierce, hot look in his eyes, and then looks abruptly away and walks back around the desk. He looks at the tablet, closing the image of the note and opening a file of some kind, beginning to scroll through it.

"Just watch your distance with that man, you may think you can trust him now, but you can't ever count on that for certain."

_Yes sir._ The words hover on the tip of Mac's tongue, but he can't bring himself to say them. Instead, he says something else, returning to a topic that is, somehow, unbelievably, safer ground. "It was supposed to be me on the ground on this one," he says, referring to the mission in Bosnia. "If you're the one the message is meant for, why now? Why this mission, one I was supposed to be on? You weren't ever going to be there at all, even if things had been executed as planned."

"Why would anyone be targeting you, Angus? You haven't been in this industry long enough to make the kind of enemies I have, so even if they meant they wanted you there, it was me they were after ultimately. You'd have just been means to an end, me obviously being that end. Hell, maybe it's supposed to mean that you were the one he meant to kill all along, and they just picked the Wright kid because you weren't there."

There's no part of that sentence that Mac doesn't find viscerally horrifying, and he swallows past the sudden lump of fear that's ridden in his throat to say, a little hysterically, "Sir, come on, you have to- someone died, and you're not even considering that you might be wrong! You're not listening to me!"

Like some kind of incredibly put-upon elementary school teacher, James raises a hand to his face and pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing audibly before shooting a disdainful look at Mac, who is having a hard time keeping his breathing under control.

"Of course I'm not listening to," James says, a hint of condescension in his voice, like he's actually talking to an elementary schooler, slow and exasperated. "You're young and you're naive and you have all these ideas in your head about saving the world - the _entire_ world - and yes it's terrible that young man died, but people are going to die! On this job, sometimes people are going to _die_ and you can't let that drive you completely out of your mind. See reason, for once. This entire event is about me, it was from the start. I know exactly who's responsible, and when I track him down, he is going to get the option of a bullet or a prison sentence and about ten seconds to choose. You can either help me or get out of my way. So far, you've been making the right call. Don't let this change that."

Now, Mac's breathing is completely out of control and his head is spinning, either from what James has just said to him or from an actual lack of oxygen. He's thinking about a hundred different things at once, flashes of moments popping into his mind and out again just as quickly, chest and throat tight. The hospital, Jack's wrenching insistence that he should've- _would've_ been there, _wild horses,_ the bombshell of the depth and scope of his entire team's investigation into his father. The pointless, incomprehensible death of Zachary Wright, in the wrong place at the wrong time, rescued and then taken all over again, a young man who died alone and scared in Sweden-

In _Bosnia._

His skin is tingling and seems to have grown too tight. Mac feels like he needs to sleep for a year, like he needs to retire though he hasn't so much as hit twenty-five, like things will always keep being like this until it overwhelms him and pulls him under completely.

James doesn't notice. He's tapping at his phone again, reaching down every so often to swipe at the tablet, enlarge or highlight something on it, muttering under his breath low enough that Mac can't make out any words over the rushing, thudding sound of his own heartbeat in his ears. His father is thoroughly lost to the world, lost to the here and now, Captain Ahab locked in a fixated death-spiral with his white whale, damn the consequences and the collateral.

As a too-strong wave of dizziness ripples over him, Mac forces himself to take a deep, slow breath. He inhales and counts along, holds it, and exhales, repeating the process until he feels like he's actually getting enough oxygen to his brain. While he does this, he watches James out of the corner of his eye, afraid of what the reaction might be if he's caught in such a state for what would likely be described as no reason at all. There really was no point, though. So completely distracted is James, and for long enough, that Mac is able to breathe through what was likely a panic attack without James ever noticing, despite less than ten feet separating them.

Eventually, Mac calms down enough to find the silence stifling. It's almost like James has forgotten he's there entirely, a feeling he is well familiar with from his childhood. It had frightened him deeply at times, left him wondering if his father remembered him at all, if something terrible had happened and Mac woke up in a world where no one could see or hear him. He's too old for that sort of childish fear now, but the feeling that always came with it is there all the same.

So he says, just for something to say, "Matty mentioned the ground team should be here tonight. We can sit down with them tomorrow and go through things with them. I'm sure Matty has some kind of a theory that might be useful to guide-"

"Webber's theories won't be necessary. She's not to be read in on this any farther."

Mac's life would probably be easier on the whole if he could learn how to stop beign surprised by moments like this one. Evidently noticing and reading his silence, James looks up and sees the expression on Mac's face, then rolls his eyes.

"Come on, be realistic, please. You're aware that this is need to know. The investigation into Walsh is restricted, and I have no plans to read Webber in. I'll be meeting with Alicia Paiz and Chanelle Luther myself. I have a sketch artist already on standby, I'll take them there to get their interviews done, and then at least we'll know whether it was Walsh himself or a proxy they met at the Embassy, the one with the credentials of, uh..."

"Elias Dermott," Mac finishes for him, and before he can be chastised for interrupting or being a smartass, which is usually how James categorizes moments when Mac provides information he doesn't think is crucial or is embarrassed to have forgotten, he goes on. "You're meeting them straight there when they land? Not tomorrow?"

Squinting in exasperated confusion, James says, "Yes, obviously."

"They're not going to get in until the middle of the night, though, and what they just went through-"

"They're agents, and 'what they just went through'," James uses the hand not holding his phone to create air quotes as he parrots Mac's words back to him, "is their job. I need them while their recall is fresh, you understand this concept. It's terrible, what they saw, but they're professionals and they can handle it. Paiz and Luther will be fine."

There isn't any point in arguing with him on a good day, and certainly not when he gets like this about anything remotely to do with Walsh, so Mac doesn't. He just stands there while James seems to come to the conclusion that this conversation is over, straightening up. The tablet is tucked into his bag, his phone back into his pocket, and then James is walking towards his office door.

"I need to start making inquiries into our intel and contacts in the region," he says as he brushes past Mac, who barely restrains the urge to take a step back when the edge of James's coat brushes his arm. "I'll let you know if I need you, but in the meantime, please do your best to conduct yourself and your business as usual. Don't let yourself get rusty, your team is back on rotation next week, and I expect you're going to keep up to the standards of field readiness, do you understand?"

"Yes sir," Mac says, mouth numb around the words.

"Oh, and." The door is open and in his hand when he stops, though before he actually says whatever it is he'd remembered he was going to say, James lets it go and it swings shut. The moments it takes for the latch to click feel like they last a lifetime. "I know I don't have to tell you that you can't breathe a word of this to anyone. The vital secrecy of anything to do with Walsh can't be compromised just because you've decided you want to star in some feel-good buddy cop film with Dalton. He doesn't have you so thoroughly snowed that you're going to disobey basic, direct orders you've been following without issue for years, does he?"

It's obvious by the empty space he lets stretch out between them, eyebrows arched expectantly, that this is one of those moments where James wants an actual answer out of him. So Mac swallows down the panic he can feel surging back up in him like a swarm of angry, agitated butterflies, and forces his still-numb lips to cooperate.

"No sir." He feels cold and distant, and James nods, the look on his face a kind of satisfaction that could almost be mistaken for pride.

"Good," he says, and then he's gone.

The office door swings shut behind him, and Mac is left alone.


	37. What If It Makes You Lose Faith In Me

_this is one i've been thinking about since before i started writing this fic and i can only hope to have done it justice. that said, it's a heavy one, so see warnings at the end of note. _

_additionally - all information in this chapter pertaining to swifts and their migratory patterns is sourced from having lived many years in the state of oregon. i have ZERO idea if they are in california or if they migrate there like they did up in oregon, i'm just making some stuff up. apologies to any ornithologists or bird enthusiasts who may be reading this._

_(chapter warnings: dream sequence involving mac's near-death experience in sweden in moderate detail, discussion of the graphic warning james gave mac about the consequences of telling bozer what they do, a good amount of focus on the fear of losing someone you love, discussion of bozer's brother josh's death when they were kids.)_

* * *

The investigation into whatever it is his team thinks is rotten at the core of DXS is deep and expansive and Mac, when he's not busy being sick to his stomach, is reluctantly impressed by it. He doesn't rescind his refusal to help them try and pin it all on James, but what he does agree to is being interviewed. There are apparently dozens of after-action reports they want to ask him about, moments that are unclear or that have possibly had pieces altered or removed, things that happened before Jack's hiring that only Mac could possibly provide answers about. In all honesty, Mac doesn't know if he'd have agreed to it, were it not for the way he was asked.

"Nobody is going to make you do anything you're not comfortable with." Matty says it with such grave seriousness you'd think she was talking about something of life-or-death importance. "It's true that there are questions in this investigation that you are the only person with the answers to, but that doesn't mean we're going to back you into something you don't want to do. It's your choice, and there will be no consequences if you say no."

Mac debates it, internally, for several long moments, whether or not she actually means that. It could be a trick question - it usually is a trick question - but Riley is sitting next to him, her leg pressed against his from hip to knee, a sustained point of pressure and warmth that feels like some kind of reminder. And Jack is there as well, the look on his face a kind of determined protectiveness that Mac is only just starting to recognize, like if anyone tried to force Mac into anything they'd have to go through Jack first, and they wouldn't make it through Jack.

It's that offer of a way out, and the promise that it would be honored, that allows Mac the ability to decide to stay. And so he agrees, and it begins.

It's a long slog through old missions and reports, slogging through things and past people that Mac hasn't thought about in literal years. In the process, things get dredged to the surface, too, things that now won't leave him alone. He's thinking about old partners, and people he's met on ops once and never seen again, days so long he thought he'd age a decade by the end of them and weeks that passed in the blink of a frantic eye, and it all mixes together.

There's a twinge of guilt at how much effort Mac puts into masking it, exactly what going through these reports like this is doing to him. If Jack and Riley, Matty even most likely, were aware of the extent it's affecting him, they'd probably shut it down, or at the very least talk about the idea that he might be better off outside the investigation. After being kept in the dark, now knowing what's going on, Mac can't stand the thought of that.

Besides, he has to get to the bottom of what he can, piecing together the bits that they don't, _can't_ know about. As much as he's willing to tell them what he remembers about these missions, there are parts he can't talk about, not even now. Parts to do with Walsh, with instructions James gave him that need to stay between them, as he's been so recently reminded. So Mac sits there and talks and talks, watches Riley create folders with names on them, _Cassandra Hall, Adam O'Reilly, Seth Haken, Daisy Bradley, Derek Riggs, Karen English._

The worst part is the dreams.

Most of them he doesn't really remember, just waking with a sense of anxious, off put deja vu, but there's one in particular he's having over and over again, sometimes multiple nights in a row.

Sweden haunts him when he sleeps. The alley in Stockholm is the backdrop to his dreams more often than not these days, but something is different. In the dream, Mac doesn't lose consciousness to the sound of his old partner, Karen English, shouting somewhere that sounds very far away, but likely hadn't been farther than the end of the street. No, in this grim replay of events, it's eerily silent. In the dream, Mac lays on the damp pavement, shuddering and gasping as pain overloads his nervous system and his body registers the catastrophic damage the bullet has done to him, the taste of copper wetting his lips, and the only other person who is ever there is James.

His father stands over him and watches impassively, face carved from stone and eyes disappointed. He doesn't chastise or berate or lecture, he just stands there, wordlessly, and watches Mac bleed to death on the slowly saturating ground, the city still and careless around them. Mac is never sure how much time passes in the dream, but he always wakes feeling like it's been hours, hand flying up to clasp over the side of his neck, to defensively block the site of that terrible wound from suffering any further damage.

Bozer knows something is wrong. How could he not? He's shaken Mac awake mid-nightmare more than once, sitting at the side of his bed and talking quietly while Mac trembles and breathes in broken gasps, clutching the side of his neck. It's obvious in the way he looks at Mac in the mornings even when there wasn't enough noise to alert him to his roommate's ongoing nightmares, squinting at him over the kitchen island, troubled. At least it isn't every night that the dream wakes them both up, though Bozer's suspicious looks at his unsteady hands and the bags under his eyes tell him it's not overly reassuring.

It's something that never happens when he isn't at home, the yelling in his sleep. If it did, he'd have heard it from one of his partners long ago, but nobody has said a word, including James, and Hall at least would've mentioned it, if not one of the others. Something tells Mac that part of how exhausted he always is coming off long missions is the fact that, when he can get to sleep at all, his sleep on missions is far from deep or long enough to sink truly into the depth of the kind of nightmares that end with him bolting upright, throat hoarse and his own voice echoing in his ears.

Home, though, home is where his body knows he's safe enough to rest, which brings with it the side effect of knowing he's also safe enough to make noise at night, let the nightmares rip out of his throat and into the real world. If it happened any more often, Mac would be looking into some kind of sleeping medication to put a stop to it, if only because it isn't fair to Bozer for Mac's turbulent nights to disturb him too. And at the rate he's going now, since the investigation, things are going to need to change, soon.

The first mission they're assigned to after the tragedy in Bosnia is a lowball mission that's over in less than a day. It keeps them local, apprehending an internationally fugitive who'd decided that Los Angeles was the best place to hunker down and hide from the long arms of the laws of the no less than six different countries who had claim to his prosecution. Thanks to Riley's hack of his home security system and just how… persuasive Jack can be when he's standing in your living room with a weapon and a 'don't even try it' look on his face, the entire operation is over in less than twelve hours. They don't even have to leave city limits.

While he's glad for the success, Mac can't shake the feeling that they're being punished for something, that maybe this is the Director's version of putting him on probation until he's sure that Mac can handle their usual workload. He goes home feeling unsettled and itching to do something that feels more useful, more active, and that's why he supposes he does it. It's the first meeting to discuss the investigation that Mac has called himself.

The plan is that Jack and Riley will be by shortly to pick him up, and together they'll head to Riley's apartment to resume the massive undertaking of going through the backlog of reports from missions Riley had identified as having something go wrong. That list is long and the details complex, and Mac doesn't always remember right away without immersing himself in the context of what was going on around him at the time, and so it's been slow going. Especially given he's taking his own mental notes, things to compare and cross-check, trying to recall what had been related, under the table, to Walsh. He's sitting at the kitchen island, twisting at a paper clip from a box Jack left here for him at some point, already trying to put himself back in time.

The mission they're going to talk about today is one he'd been on with Adam O'Reilly, objectively his scariest partner, a combative loose cannon whose partnership with Mac had ended because he'd, in a moment of reckless gung-ho hysterica, mistaken Mac for a hostile and tried to shoot him. This is not Mac's favorite partnership to think back on, and the mission they're supposed to talk about had been a pretty rough one, only two prior to the one on which Mac had looked down the barrel of his partner's gun a moment before it was fired at him. He's lost in thought when Bozer comes into the kitchen, doesn't see him at all until his roommate's standing right next to him.

"Car's out front."

Mac nearly falls off his stool, he reacts so sharply to the sudden sound of Bozer's voice. He hadn't noticed someone else enter the room - something else that wouldn't happen anywhere but at home. It takes several long moments for his breathing to restart and for his heart to slow from its wild, terrified rabbit pace, and that's apparently enough time for Bozer to reach a breaking point they both know he's been approaching for a long time.

"Are you good?" he asks eventually, in a voice far more clipped and stiff than he usually speaks to Mac in. When he receives a nod and Mac goes to head for the door, Bozer shakes his head, stepping to the side to block his path and saying, "No."

"Bozer, what-" Mac doesn't get any farther before he's interrupted.

"Sit back down, I'll be back in a minute." With that, Bozer whirls away and heads for the door.

Shocked and confused, Mac watches him go without the wherewithal to say anything to stop him. He watches Bozer step out the front door, something in his chest lurching at the sight, then calming when he hears the raised voice call for Riley and Jack to come inside. The air buzzes as Bozer re-enters, and Mac is overcome with the sense that something has shifted, and not for the better.

Riley and Jack look absolutely baffled as Bozer shepherds them into the living room, then turns and gestures for Mac to join them. He gets all three of them in front of him before he says anything to explain, and his expression strikes Mac to the core. He looks upset in a way Mac can't remember ever having seen him get before, a miasma of anger and something else, something that flits in and out of shape too fast to be identified.

"I'm not an idiot," is the first thing that comes out of Bozer's mouth, and because he's felt it before, Mac knows that this is what it feels like when your ribs snap, sharp and searing, stealing your breath away. "And also I've got eyes, so you know what, you can have your secret meeting at the freaking table rather than the Applebees or wherever it is you keep sneaking off to, because I'm done. I'm done pretending I don't know something's going on, and I'm done pretending you guys work at a think tank or anywhere close to that, because it's a lie and I know it is. You've been lying to me for _years_ and I'm done pretending I don't know about it. I'm _done."_

Mac's ears are ringing and his heart is beating in his throat. He'd always hoped it would last longer, this version of safety, of peace, the illusion that at least here, nothing from the job could touch either of them. He never had any idea what 'longer' meant, just that every time he contemplated the inevitable collapse of the house of cards he and Bozer live in together, a world where his best friend is safe and untouched by the evil Mac brings to their front door every time he comes home, he couldn't bear the thought.

"So that's it, huh? You don't even have anything to say?" It's louder than normal, accusing, and Mac can't blame him. Jack tries to say something and Bozer doesn't let him get past two words, holding up a hand and saying, "No, I need to hear this from him. So, Mac, are you going to finally tell me? Or are you just going to keep lying?"

With the sound of a gunshot echoing in his ears and his father's words beating against his ribcage with every lurch of his petrified heart, _the day you tell him is the day you put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, Angus,_ Mac tells him the truth.

For a moment there, when the truth finally sits between them, released like a wild animal from a zoo cage that leaves everyone around it unsure if it will remain docile or strike out and destroy all in its wake, Bozer's patience is gone. The anger that simmered on a backburner for years, barely noticeable and almost entirely outweighed by the rest of his irreplaceable, precious friendship with Mac, surges into a roiling boil, leaving no room for anything else to exist beside it. His patience is gone and with it goes his understanding of Mac and the complicated Catch 22 way he moves through the world, the way he exists in their friendship like he's clumsily trying to speak a language he was never taught, even after all these years.

DXS. It doesn't even sound real. Terrorists and arms dealers and international spy organizations and all Bozer can focus on is the scar. He stares at Mac and all he sees is the scar, the off-colored, uneven tissue rising beside the loose collar of his shirt, not hidden by the jacket still draped over the back of his chair. With the explanation now out and in the open, Mac has stopped talking, and Bozer can see the scar moving with his shoulders, stuttering up and down with shallow, panted breaths. For a moment, he's worried, and then the worry is lost under another pulse of bright anger, white hot and overpowering. Bozer knows he can't open his own mouth because if he does, he's going to say something that he knows he'll regret.

Mac isn't talking but Jack is, Riley's voice occasionally joining in, and Bozer can't hear any of it. It's faded into a background hum, and then in an instant he's outside. He's outside and he's alone, the Los Angeles hillside stretching out empty and hollow around him, and he can't even remember making the decision to leave the house. Turning slightly, his peripheral vision catches the moment that Mac bolts from the living room, and the sight makes him turn abruptly back, facing out toward the city center.

It's maybe the angriest Bozer can ever remember feeling in his life, humming in his shoulders and inside his lungs, tingling numb in his fingertips. He's not an angry person, never has been, though he's always been passionate about things, and it's not a feeling he's comfortable with. It hurts, this anger, lurches in his chest with his heartbeat, screams in a hundred different voices in his head. The air has grown thick and Bozer pulls at the front of his shirt. It's hard to breathe, around everything battering him from the inside out.

Realistically, he's known for a long time. Years, he's known for _years_ that the think tank didn't hold any more water than a fishnet, there's no reason simply having confirmation of what he'd already known should be hitting him this hard. And yet here Bozer stands, on the back porch of the home he shares with one of the people he loves the most in the world, feeling like he's about to either combust or collapse at any moment.

'I tried to tell you as much as I ever could,' Mac had said, and honestly, that somehow makes it worse, because now Bozer can't help but go back over it. Everything Mac ever said about his job, about his partners, about where he goes and what he does when he leaves the house every day.

As bright as it burned, the fire in Bozer's chest doesn't last very long. The accelerant poured over the spark that has smouldered for years when he finally got the truth out of Mac must be one that burns fierce and fast, rapidly running through its reserves in proportion to its heat. He's sure that Mac would be able to name one that works like that, and it's this thought that turns Bozer back around. He can breathe easier now, peering in through the large windows, trying to make out what's going on inside.

Nothing is going on inside. Nothing visible at any rate. Mac hasn't returned from wherever he ran to, and it seems Jack and Riley have either joined him or left. The thought that they might have gone, might have misguidedly decided that he and Mac were better left to work out their issues on their own, is one that sends a lurching feeling through Bozer's gut, sharp and nauseating. Because if they're gone, then Mac is alone.

Mac is alone, after just having watched the one person who's been a constant through most of his life storm out of the house, eyes blazing and hands balled into enraged fists. And much as Bozer is still mad, is still struck reeling and without solid ground to stand on, the rest of the world and what he knows of it has begun to seep back in around the edges, and if there's one part of the world he knows through and through, it's Mac. And knowing Mac means knowing what the look on his face during that confession had meant, seeing the way his hands shook when he explained what his job actually is and realizing how he must be tearing himself to shreds inside, alone in his room.

Which... Much as Bozer is angry, is _furious_ and confused and hurt, he doesn't want that. He's mad at Mac but that doesn't mean he wants his best friend to punish himself far more viciously than anyone else ever could. It certainly doesn't mean he can stomach the thought of allowing it to go on for even one minute longer. So he walks back inside, navigating the living room and hallways like he's walking through a dream. Nothing feels entirely real, everything distant and static fuzzed, until he reaches Mac's room, and it all gets too real too quickly.

At least, as becomes immediately obvious when he hears the voices overlapping each other in a combination of low soothing murmurs and too-quick panicked tones, Jack and Riley didn't actually leave. Bozer looks in the doorway before anyone realizes he's there and takes in the scene unfolding in Mac's room, heart lurching up and down from high in his throat to through the floor and back again. Mac is sitting on the edge of his bed, Riley and Jack on either side of him, and he's very clearly hyperventilating. He's saying something, too fast and jumbled for Bozer to make out what it is, but

When she looks up and notices him, Riley says, "Jack, hey," and then gets up, motioning for Jack to join her. They step away from the bed, hovering near the door as Bozer walks over to Mac, allowing the two of them space but not quite leaving. When he sees who's approaching him, Mac makes a sound in the back of his throat like he's trying to speak but can't get it out right, then looks down at his hands, fingers knotted together in his lap so tightly they're a bloodless kind of pale. Bozer moves slowly but determinedly, and when he reaches the bed he sits down.

Whatever he'd been building up to say while walking through the house is gone now, and so Bozer follows his instinct and leans over. Mac is stiff and trembling in his arms, still breathing like he's just run a marathon, and it takes him a moment to react, to reach up and rest his hands against Bozer's back in a return grip that starts out hesitant and quickly becomes desperate. Within moments they're both clutching each other with a bruising kind of strength, and Bozer can feel the cold damp of the cheek pressed to his neck against the aching throb of his pulse.

"I'm not going anywhere," is what Bozer says when he finally finds his voice again. Mac's chest heaves against his in a great, shaking breath, and Bozer's arms go fractionally tighter around him. "I'm… I'm _pissed as hell,_ and it's not okay, it's _far_ from okay, but I'm not leaving. I need a minute, but I'm coming back. I'm not leaving."

Mac doesn't respond verbally, doesn't agree or say he understands either what Bozer has said or why, but he does nod, and that's enough. It has to be enough, because as difficult as it is to do, Bozer has to pull himself away again, walk back out of that room and outside once more, where the air is at least marginally easier to breathe.

What's a little surprising is that this time, someone follows him. Not right away, Bozer has a few minutes to hunch over the wooden railing and try and get some semblance of control over the storm wreaking havoc inside him. The anger, with its heat and its noise, has all but faded now, but something else has risen to take its place. This feeling is cold and deep and chokes him not with the sense of a hand around his throat but with that of lungs that just can't expand. When the sliding door opens, he glances over his shoulder once, then looks back out to the city. Focusing on its distant, anonymously glittering lights is the only sense of stability he can find right now, and he can't afford to let go of it for more than a moment.

For a long time, Jack doesn't say anything. He doesn't go back inside either - Bozer doesn't hear the door again, though he's half-listening for it this time - but he doesn't speak, waiting with the kind of patient space that makes Bozer suddenly understand the progress he's made with Mac after these months. Eventually, tearing his eyes off the haze of downtown LA, Bozer turns around. He braces his back against the railing and looks at Jack, who looks back at him with calm, patient expectancy.

Funny, Bozer never would've pinned Jack Dalton for a man with an abundance of patience to spare. Not with the way he gets on board game nights, or watching a hockey match, or whenever the topic of James MacGyver comes up. But here he stands, leaning against a wood post supporting the trellis overhead and waiting, arms folded and expression neutral.

Shifting slightly, Bozer's palm slides over to press against his own side, over a tattoo that sits under the fabric of his shirt, one he's had since he turned eighteen years old. The only one he has. He swallows and opens his mouth to speak, though all that comes out is a faint, airless croak. A few seconds slip away and he tries again, and this time it works, though his voice is hoarse and unsteady.

"I knew," he says, and Jack nods. "I already knew. I told you I knew, the day I met you, I mean, I didn't know exactly what, or that it was _so-_ but I still… I _knew._" It's like once the words have started coming there's no stopping them, tripping over each other out into the still, heavy space between them. "If I already knew, and I've known for _years_ it's not like this is recent, then why am I still… How come I'm…" His side is throbbing sharp and acute, and it's almost like he can feel the tattoo gun all over again, the sting and burn from the day the artwork was indelibly inked into his skin.

"There's knowing, and then there's _knowing."_

Despite the fact that it shouldn't make sense, it does, and Bozer's chin dips down towards his chest. "Yeah," he murmurs, quiet and exhausted.

There's knowing and then there's being unable to escape knowing, there's losing the last vestige of plausible deniability, of 'maybe I'm seeing things, maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, maybe it's all in my head'. As mad as he is- was- as mad as he _got_ at Mac for the lies and the secrecy, Bozer has to admit that he really hadn't wanted to know. Not for a really long time, not until he couldn't stand it any more and finally asked.

"Why did he do it?" The question comes out of nowhere, not even Bozer expecting it until he asks, looking up and straight at Jack. Jack, who has gotten closer to Mac than anyone has been able to in a long time, who made an oath to Bozer the day they met that he'd do whatever he needed to in order to keep Mac safe, who dropped everything and came when Bozer called the day of the heat-stroke nightmare. If anybody is going to have answers, it's going to be Jack.

"Do what?" Jack asks.

"Lie to me. I know it's not because he didn't think I could keep a secret and he wouldn't work himself up that bad on his own, so someone had to… Why would he lie to me like that for so long, about so much?" Even as he asks, Bozer has a sneaking suspicion he has a pretty good idea who is likely responsible. It's confirmed when Jack looks away, face going hard as he thinks, and then answers.

"You know now that James is the Director of DXS."

"Yeah," agrees Bozer. _And I'd imagine he's an absolute nightmare,_ he doesn't add out loud, though he can't imagine Jack would disagree.

"Seems he had a pretty strong conversation with Mac, right at the beginning of all this. Told him he couldn't tell you anything, or else… He was pretty persuasive."

Now, another day, he might've let it drop there, but this isn't another day, and so Bozer pushes. "I've had just about enough of people keeping parts of things from me, so why don't you come out and tell me whatever piece of that you just left out."

Jack's face twists into a deeper grimace, and the gnawing pit in Bozer's gut grows wider.

"If you think it'd be better, I can ask Mac myself." That seems to do it, because as soon as he says it, Jack turns back to face him, shoulders squared. There's an apology in his eyes and Bozer almost regrets asking, though he knows he can't take it back, can't tell Jack he actually doesn't want to know. He _has_ to know.

"Bastard told him that if he let you find out, he was as good as killing you himself." The words send a shock of ice through Bozer's chest and his hand clamps down harder on his side, pressing so deeply into his own body that he can almost imagine he can feel the lines of the tattoo, somewhat raised like a braille message only he can read. But Jack isn't done yet, because he goes on, and says, "If I'm to understand right, there was evidently some pretty colorful imagery used, I think it was that if Mac told you, he was essentially putting a gun to your head and… well, you can put the rest together yourself, I'm sure."

Bozer sure _feels_ like he's been shot, and with the breathless sense of a brutal impact comes the anger again, rushing back harder and hotter than it had been before. This time, it's not Mac he's angry at - though what he'd said inside still stands. This isn't okay yet, maybe won't be for a while, but as upset as he is with Mac, it pales in comparison to the sheer hatred melting a crater in him when he thinks about James.

"That… He told Mac… _That… _How could he..." It won't come out all the way, and it's probably for the best. Bozer doesn't generally like using that kind of language, though he'd make an exception for this man in a heartbeat.

"Yeah, I know." Judging by the tone of his voice, Jack would agree. "Trust me, least favorite part of the job is answering to him. If it weren't for Matty, and Mac obviously, I'd probably have jumped ship months ago."

Even the thought is enough to scare Bozer, and he feels a jolt of cold adrenaline spike up the back of his neck. His eyes have gone wide and the panic must show in them, because Jack shakes his head and gives something approximating a smile.

"Don't worry, kid, I'm not going anywhere," Jack says, and hearing it out loud does something to at least fractionally slow Bozer's heart rate back down. Coming from anybody else, it might have sounded patronizing, the term of address, the reassurance itself, but not from Jack. From Jack it sounds warm and solid, a promise without a hint of judgement at having needed to hear it. For the umpteenth time, Bozer is glad that this is the man out there working to keep Mac alive, that this has somehow translated into a friend Bozer himself never would've met otherwise and has come to deeply appreciate.

Thinking of how Jack entered their lives takes Bozer down another road entirely, to the need for his existence at all. The explanation Mac gave him about DXS is somewhat hazy and disjointed in his mind, disrupted both by Mac's agitation in telling it and in the shockwave of anger and disbelief that had rolled over Bozer in hearing it. But somewhere in there had been that Jack was basically what he'd been explained to be - a bodyguard, a security detail, though obviously it's a lot more complicated than that. The crux of it is that his job is to keep Mac safe, to keep Mac alive. A job that's a lot harder and involves a lot more active rescue from the razor jaws of death than Bozer had initially known it did.

Looking down, he sees that the hand he doesn't have tucked up under his arm, against his ribcage, is shaking. He watches it for a few seconds, fascinated by the involuntary movement, as a lump rises in his throat and his eyes sting. The identification of what has risen in place of the anger comes in a soft sigh, and Bozer can't believe he didn't realize it before. After all, he's spent years growing close with this particular emotion, never quite too far away from it though it's eased and dimmed somewhat in the years that have passed since the worst day of his life.

Grief. Welling up in him, suffocating Bozer from the inside out, is bone-deep grief. His fingers curl that much harder into his side and he can imagine he can feel his own heartbeat through his shirt, fluttering like the wings of the silhouette of the common swift that lays immortalized on his body, soaring mid-flight above the inked script of his baby brother's name and the dates of his birth and death.

They'd gone as a family, every year, to watch the swifts on the day of their migration. There was an elementary school near the house where scores and scores of common swifts made a nest in the vast, decommissioned chimney stack that sat in the center of the low, nondescript building. Every year, when it came time for the migration, families from all over the neighborhood would gather and sit on the grassy hill beside the school to watch. It would start as a trickle, one by one, until all in a rush as if communicating by some kind of networked thought, the birds would cascade into the sky. They'd circle and funnel around each other, a cloud of flapping wings and tiny feathers, leaving Bozer awestruck and staring up into the darkening dusk sky, unable to describe how he felt seeing the vastness of the world around him displayed so starkly.

It was Josh's favorite thing in the world. Not even Christmas could hold a candle to the swifts. And so, as soon as he'd turned eighteen, Bozer got the tattoo. He got it as a memorial and a reminder, a way to carry his brother with him even though the boy was gone, ripped from his life before he'd gotten to find out what it was like to be teenagers together, to know who Josh would have been as an adult.

Now, standing outside his house opposite Jack, Jack who turned out to be some kind of elite secret agent, one who worked with Mac in the same capacity, Bozer chokes on a miasma of old and new grief, and thinks about his other side. The memorial to Josh is on his right, and he can see it now, the tattoo he would get at his left, the outstretched wing and the long neck of the heron that would fly forever over Mac's name and the numbers representing the day he was born and the day he died. He's thought about it before, fleeting and brief, in the dead of night when Mac was away on what he now knows were missions, saving the world or some part of it.

"He's…" Bozer looks from Jack out over the patio, at the string of lights wound around the trellis, looks back again. He can almost feel Josh's name burning an imprint into his palm, the reminder that the grief almost killed him the first time, and he doesn't know how he'll survive it a second. Not when the pre-emptive rise of it, the way he's been mourning since Mac told him the truth, is almost enough to take him to his knees. "He's not going to stop, is he."

It's not even a question, but Jack answers it anyway, saying, slow and tired, "No, he's not. I don't think he'd know how, even if he wanted to."

Nodding, Bozer lifts the hand not still jammed over the tattoo, brushes it across his forehead, presses his thumb and forefinger over his eyes. He'd figured as much. "And there's nothing I can do to convince him to, is there."

Still not a question, and still Jack answers, empathy so deep in the words it makes Bozer's breath catch. "If there was, I'd have already tried it. All I can do is keep doing my best to make sure he makes it home, just like I promised you."

"You have to." He isn't expecting it to come out so fiercely, hand jerking away from his eyes as it does, but Bozer can't bring himself to regret it. It doesn't matter if they've had this conversation before, he'll say it as many times as he needs to, until he feel like Jack _gets_ it, gets what it will do to him if Mac dies.

"I will," Jack promises, and it isn't enough.

"Losing a brother," Bozer says, everything in him rebelling at the words, because this is something he does not talk about, and yet he has to, because it is vitally important for Jack to understand, to get what this means for him, "rips out a part of you that you can never get back or fix. I can't do that again."

If it takes Jack by surprise, the knowing in his voice, the 'again', he doesn't betray so, and he doesn't ask. Instead, he closes the distance between them, walking up to Bozer and putting two strong, steady hands on his shoulders, and says, "I swear to you, on my momma's life and my daddy's grave, Bozer, I'll die before I let him even come close to not making it home. And just so you know, a lot of things have tried to kill me so far, some of 'em with a pretty massive bodycount. None of it stuck. I'm a hard man to kill, and I plan on staking all of that on him, every day of my life. Okay? He's coming home, if I have a single word to say about it. I promise. God's honest, kid, I promise."

Because he can't stand the thought of anything else, because he barely made it through the first session in the tattoo artist's chair, because Jack sounds so sure it's hard to believe he could be saying anything but the truth, Bozer decides to allow himself to believe it.

Mac is already asleep by the time he goes back inside. It's been something of an exhausting day, to be fair, and it's worn late by the time the eye of the hurricane has blown over. He walks through the house in something of a daze, the familiarity of it soothing and stinging at the same time, a bandage wrapped over the top of a fresh wound. Bozer stops in the doorway of Mac's room, sees him curled on his side facing away from the door, Riley sitting next to him with her legs stretched out over the top of the bedspread. She looks up when she hears him approach, and her hand is on Mac's upper arm when Bozer walks in, almost like she's guarding him.

For some time, Bozer just stands there next to the bed and looks at his sleeping roommate, heart throbbing in time with the ache in his left side, the blank space where the heron would go. Riley doesn't say anything, but she does lean a bit when Bozer gets close enough, her shoulder bumping into his hip and staying there for a beat longer than can be explained away as an accident. He touches her back in response, light and brief, and when she gets up and steps away, walks around him out of the room, he feels like they've had a whole conversation in those few moments.

Slowly, tired and sore like he's done a triathlon he didn't train for, Bozer climbs up onto the mattress in the space Riley left vacant. He thinks for a moment about waking Mac up, then thinks he might not have to when there's a soft sound somewhere from the blanket covered chest and Mac rolls over, facing him now. Despite the noise and the movement, though, the swap of people beside him, Mac doesn't wake up, and Bozer decides not to encourage him to. Instead, he leans over and flicks off the lamp, leaving the room cloaked in darkness and calm.

There's a box of paperclips, on the table next to Mac's bed. On an odd impulse, Bozer reaches over him and snags them, the slight rattle of thin metal strips against each other inside the cardboard loud next to the backdrop of his and Mac's off-beat duet of breathing. He shifts in place, easing downwards until he lays fully stretched out on the mattress, the blanket pulled up over him against the slight chill of the deepening night. The movement is enough to have jostled Mac slightly, one of his arms falling to the side until the knuckles of his curled hand brush against Bozer's shirt, over the tattoo of the swift.

Fumbling slightly in the low light left by the illuminated numbers on the clock, Bozer manages to get the box of paperclips open without spilling any. He sets the box down on the mattress beside his hip and picks a few of them out. Whatever magic Mac works on them is lost to him, so he settles for locking them together, sliding the curved ends around each other until they _snic_ into place. There's something soothing about it, he has to admit, the repetitive motion of linking paperclip after paperclip into a chain. Mac makes a sound at one point, barely audible and completely unintelligible, outreached hand flexing just enough for his fingertips to catch against Bozer's shirt, the faintest suggestion of holding on.

By the time he drifts off into a light, dreamless sleep, there's a trail of glinting silver going all the way down to the floor.


	38. That's Enough For Today

_figured we all deserved a little bit of a gentle, breather chapter in between all the madness, real and fictional. sorry it isn't very plot heavy but i think we all needed it. i hope you enjoy! as always, i am on tumblr at altschmerzes._

_as always, thanks for your lovely reviews, they really make my day every time!_

_(chapter title is from radical face's 'doubt')_

* * *

Morning arrives gently. This in itself is something of a shock, given how waking up has gone for Mac in recent times. His eyes open in a slow drift rather than a sharp snap, chest hitching halfway through a deep inhale and turning it into a jaw-cracking yawn. The light streaming into the room is the heavy gold of late morning, far later than Mac usually gets up, and he's got the kind of slight, foggy headache that comes when you get too much sleep. This is, suffice it to say, not a problem he generally experiences. The whole situation is wildly confusing. He can't even remember, thinking on it, having dreamed at all that night, not after the first few times he woke from a shallow unconsciousness with Riley sitting next to him, telling him to go back to sleep.

Pushing himself slowly upright, Mac yawns again and looks around the room. He's alone now but he clearly hasn't been that way for long, given that he's on the far side of the bed and the empty space next to him is rumpled and slept in. There's also something glinting at the edge of the mattress, and Mac frowns, leaning over to pick it up. It's a chain of linked paperclips, a rather long one. He twists it absently around his fingers and listens hard, a distant sound having alerted him that while he may be alone in his room, he's not alone in the house.

A faint clatter followed by running water says that someone is moving around in the kitchen, which usually means that Bozer is conducting some sort of culinary experiment. However, when Mac listens closer he can make out two voices, one deeper than would be expected from Bozer talking back to whatever podcast he was listening to, and one higher. Jack and Riley.

It sounds like Riley is asking a question and Jack is now answering, and Mac's eyebrows raise. They must have returned first thing in the morning, if they're here already and messing around in the kitchen. Before he can get up and investigate, footsteps break from the rest of the noise and get louder as they approach his room, while the voices stay put. Bozer appears moments later, poking his head around the doorframe and peers in before noticing that Mac is awake and upright.

"Hey!" Bozer greets, walking over and taking a seat at the side of the bed that, if Mac had to guess, he was the one to occupy not too long ago. "You're up! Perfect timing. Jack's making breakfast and I guess Riley's helping, but I'm pretty sure that actually just means she's heckling him."

It's a funny thought and Mac can't help snorting softly, shaking his head. The sounds he was hearing from the kitchen certainly make more sense now.

Silence lapses over the two of them as the brief moment of humor fades quickly, leaving behind it the kind of uncomfortable emptiness that gives meaning to the phrase 'still waters run deep.' The previous night hangs over Mac's shoulders like a fishing net with stones sewn around the edges, and guilt is a smoke that fills his lungs until breathing is a chore. Bozer is thinking about it too. Mac can't explain how he knows but he knows, looking at the faraway, troubled expression on his best friend's face.

"Are you okay?" is what comes out when Mac forces himself to speak.

Bozer's shoulders rise and fall with a deep, sighing breath as he thinks for a moment, then asks in return, "Are either of us?"

It's a fair point, and Mac's chin dips down towards his chest in a nod of acknowledgement. But there's still more he has to say, and so he grits his teeth, steels his resolve, and keeps going. "I'm sorry. I don't know if I actually said that last night," he hopes he did, he'd better have, but the whole evening exists in his memory as an awful, panicked blur and he can't quite remember for sure, "but I really am sorry. You deserve better than being lied to, especially by me."

As he considers what's been said, Bozer's head tilts slowly from side to side like he's weighing something. There's an unhappy downward twist to his mouth, and Mac is starting to feel the nausea of last night returning, right up until he actually speaks, and it's immediately obvious that the person responsible for the growing resentment in his eyes isn't Mac at all.

"Sounds to me like you didn't really have a choice," Bozer says, and suddenly, Mac knows that face. It's the same face he's been seeing on his friend since they were children, almost every time Bozer and James have ended up in one room.

"I'm still sorry," Mac repeats, though the urge to let it go is strong. Much as he wants to let it end there, Bozer deserves better than that, and better than that from him specifically. "Choice or not, I still did it, and I'm still apologizing. Because I _am_ sorry."

Now Bozer looks at him, away from where he'd been staring absently at the spots of light dappled across Mac's bedroom wall. He still doesn't look happy, but the resentment is gone. The lines around his eyes have gone from anger to something softer but still pained, and he says, "Okay. Thank you." Then, after a pause, quieter, "I forgive you. I'm not… Okay with it. And I don't know how long it'll take me before I can wrap my head around the whole thing but. I forgive you."

With a throat too tight to say anything, Mac nods and looks down. The paperclip chain he'd found on the mattress when he woke up is still twisted around one hand and he stares at it to give himself something to focus on, something other than the relief and fierce affection gashing at his lungs from the inside out.

By the time he's able to lift his eyes back to the room's other occupant, after who knows how long of keeping his head bowed and breathing with a deliberate steadiness, he's started to feel it. The attention focused on him so hard it's like a physical sensation prickling over his skin. Bozer is looking at him alright, wearing the third variation on an odd frown that he's had this morning like he's trying to build an entire language out of them. To be more specific, Bozer is looking not at Mac's face but down and to the side a bit, at where the relaxed collar of the old, overwashed t-shirt he sleeps in hangs wide enough that his scar is more visible than usual.

"What?" Mac asks after several moments pass and Bozer is still staring.

"Is it alright if I…" The question trails off at the same time that Bozer's hand lifts, moving just far enough that Mac gets the idea of his intention, and then stops.

Mac swallows past a dry throat, and nods. "Go ahead."

With fingers so cautious it's almost comical, Bozer gently moves the collar of the shirt even farther to the side, just enough that the scar is fully visible, exposed to the air in all its ugliness. Mac shivers lightly, feeling suddenly cold and very exposed, but holds still and doesn't pull away.

"This didn't happen in an accident, did it." It's flat, not quite a question, but Mac answers it anyway.

"No." It takes a moment to come up with what to tell him about it, how to put the truth in sparing enough detail that it won't be the entire brutal story but also won't sound anything like a cover-up or a lie. If Bozer asks, Mac knows he'll tell him everything. He can't keep telling half truths. But if he doesn't ask, there's no reason he needs to hear this. "I got shot. On a mission in Sweden. It was pretty bad."

Instead of replying out loud, Bozer does something else instead. He flattens his hand out, letting go of the collar of Mac's shirt to press down over the scar, covering it entirely with his palm. His touch is warm and solid and Mac finds himself reaching up, putting his own hand over Bozer's and leaving it there, the two of them shielding the wound, and the truth, together. The thought flits, light and fast as a spark down a wire, through Mac's mind, that there are three people in the world he wouldn't absolutely lay out on the floor for even trying to touch him there, that vulnerable skin of his neck and shoulder that has already been the site of so much violence. And right now, this morning, they're all here together in this house.

For a long, laden stretch of silence, Mac and Bozer sit there on his bed together, pressure between them growing heavier as they both lean on each other as they have done for years. It's almost unbelievable, now, that just last night- hell, just a few minutes ago, Mac had been afraid he'd ruined this.

Eventually they wander back out into the rest of the house. Mac snags the Dallas Stars hoodie on the way out of his room, shrugging it on and zipping it up, stuffing his hands into his pockets and telling himself he'd only grabbed it because they tend to keep the house on the cooler side. Bozer doesn't call him on it, and upon entering the open floor plan of the living room and kitchen, Mac discovers he's far from the only person who's made interesting clothing choices today.

It is immediately clear, when he sees Jack and Riley, that they didn't come back early at all. They never left in the first place, if what they're wearing is anything to go by. Jack is dressed from the go bag he keeps in his car, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but Riley is another matter entirely. Riley is wearing charcoal grey sweatpants that are cuffed several times and a red long-sleeved shirt that hangs off her like she'd got it from the wrong section of the clothing department, which makes sense, given it's not hers.

As Mac looks at her, mystified and taking in the fact that she's wearing his clothes, he thinks he remembers vaguely, earlier that morning, having had some sense that someone had come into his room. He'd drifted almost all the way back to awareness, only to be spoken to softly by a voice he knew, and then he'd gone right back asleep. It's an unnerving thought, that he was able to sleep through someone coming into his room and stealing clothing out of his dresser, someone else starting up breakfast in the kitchen, all of this happening around him. Usually, sleep is an elusive goal, and not waking up at someone entering your space is a dangerous failure of instinct.

It's unsettling, but Mac can't say it's exactly bad, and if he tried to assert that he was bothered by the fact that Riley was borrowing his things, he'd be both a liar and a hypocrite. So instead he greets both her and Jack with a sheepish smile, acutely aware that he is the last person up by a significant measure, and settles in to watch the meal preparations.

Jack is making a skillet fry breakfast that looks like it could feed a small army, while Riley alternates between poking fun at the apron he's wearing and sneaking in to steal things out of the pan. She grins when he chastises her for it, rebukes that hold not an ounce of actual heat, and Bozer laughs. Mac sits at the kitchen island and lets his eyes drift shut as it all washes over him, the sound of their voices and the smell of the oil sizzling on the stove.

It's nice. A person could get used to this sort of thing.

After breakfast, Matty arrives. She's come in order to formally brief Bozer on what's going on, and ensure that he understands how important it is to keep everything under wraps. It's a necessary but truly uncomfortable and stilted conversation, one Mac spends most of hovering in the doorway, unsure if he should step away fully or participate. By the time she's gone, the easy feeling of the morning is gone with her, and Mac feels the weight of unasked questions and years of deception begin to drift down, drifting the way the snow in Minnesota had, back in January.

Riley is standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes for something to occupy her hands, and Mac has been taking apart and putting back together the locking fob for his car so many times he's surprised he hasn't actually damaged it by now. Bozer is sitting on the couch where Matty left him, looking tired, his expression distant and hard to read. Mac doesn't know what to do. For once, no matter how hard he searches through his brain, runs over the options, he can't find the answer.

As it turns out, he doesn't have to.

Jack stands by the fridge near the hallway, arms folded and a frown lightly creasing his forehead. He looks around from Mac, to Riley, to Bozer, and back again in a triptych circuit of calculating analysis, put off by what he sees. These kids, these painfully young people who not that long ago were enjoying a lazy morning - the first time he's actually known Mac to sleep in since meeting him - have aged again before his eyes, growing quiet and cracked.

In an instant, Jack makes a decision. That feeling of not so long ago, the one they'd lost when Matty arrived to formally bring Bozer into the loop, they need that back. They do, and Jack is willing to admit that maybe he does too, which is why he straightens up, clapping his hands and announcing, "Right! Okay! I'm giving you all fifteen minutes to be in the car, ready, set, go."

Absolutely nobody moves. If this were a cartoon, there would be crickets.

"Sorry, maybe you didn't hear me," he says, meeting three sets of dull, confused eyes with bright determination. "Fifteen minutes, chop chop."

"Jack, what are you talking about?" Riley is looking at him like he's completely cracked, hands still soapy from the dish water, and Mac and Bozer are wearing similar expressions, but at least it means he's got everybody's attention.

Sighing, Jack turns and points. "Boze, you don't work today, do you?"

"Uh, no? Why…"

"Great!" he says instead of answering or indeed allowing him to finish the question. "Neither do we. We're totally in the clear, all four of us, and you three look like you're about to worry yourselves into a set of early graves, and as our designated responsible adult, I just can't let that happen. So. Fifteen minutes. Let's go."

Not seeming to have recieved the memo, still nobody moves.

"Where are we going?" It's Mac that asks this time, and Jack sighs again.

"It's a surprise," he tells them. This is mostly to cover up for the fact that the fifteen minute deadline is less for them to get ready and more for him to figure out where exactly it is he plans on taking them. Thankfully, nobody pushes the matter again, taking him at his word when he raises his eyebrows and says, "Trust me, it'll be fun," and then he's left alone with the rest of the breakfast clean up and fifteen minutes in which to figure out where to take three extremely acutely stressed early-twenties kids with entirely too much responsibility and no idea how to relax.

It ends up taking him just over the allotted time to come up with a plan, but Jack makes the decision right as he's turning the key to start his car. Before he takes off, though, he spares a moment to ensure everybody is appropriately dressed - the pilfered sweatpants Riley had been wearing, while cutting an endearing image, were big enough on her that they would definitely pose a safety hazard. Luckily, Riley is back wearing yesterday's jeans, so while she still had Mac's red shirt on, they should be in the clear.

When Jack pulls up outside their destination, everybody seems just as deeply confused as they'd been back at the house, if not maybe more so.

"Jack." Mac is the first one to say anything, voice flatly apprehensive. "I've never…"

The bright marquee sign of the Roller Garden blinks cheerily at them over the set of double doors leading into the building. A mural depicting an artist's rendition of the tortoise and the hare, both wearing rollerblades and flowered helmets, stretches across the entirety of the exterior wall.

"What, you've never gone roller skating before?"

Nodding wordlessly, Mac looks more than a little dubious about the whole thing. Jack puts aside exactly how that piece of information makes him feel - not that it's at all shocking to imagine James MacGyver isn't the kind of father who'd take his kid to the rink on weekends, probably had him building Rube Goldberg machines in his basement or memorizing Latin or something - and focuses on the moment. On a good day. A fun day.

"Well, never fear, we've got our very own expert here with us." Looking in the rearview mirror, Jack makes eye contact with her, asking, "How many years did you do derby, Ri?"

"Four." Riley looks more excited now than Jack has seen her in a long time, and it takes him right back to years ago to see.

It had only taken one trip to see a bout one of Diane's friends was skating in for Riley to fall in love with the sport. She'd been hooked right from the go, and had proceeded to spend every spare moment she had not in school or messing with electronics on wheels, flying up and down the street or around the rink a few minutes from Diane's house. Jack never quite got over the jolt of nerves he felt when she took off so fast it was hardly possible to believe she could be in control of where she was going, but she'd loved it so much he never said a word. It's nice to see that same spark in her now, her glinting eyes the same as when they'd sat and watched those women fly around and around that track.

"Think you're up to teaching Mac here a thing or two?"

"We'll have you skating in no time," she tells him, clapping his arm and giving it a little shake, face broken out into a wide grin. Looking up towards the passenger seat, she asks, "How about you, Bozer, do you skate?"

"I do okay, not as good as you, though, I'd bet. Derby? Wow, I wish I couldn't seen that."

Riley just smiles wider, throwing the door open and already climbing out of the car by the time her answer floats over her shoulder. "Yeah, I was pretty great."

It's early in the operating hours of the rink, and there aren't many people there. Jack skates along easily, keeping pace with Bozer, who's sticking pretty close to the rink wall and doing okay, though wobbling every now and then. Ahead of them, Riley is doing the thing parents do with small children, skating backwards in front of Mac effortlessly, his hands held in hers as he teeters precariously along.

At first it took some convincing to get him to let her help, stubborn embarrassment coloring his cheeks, until Riley had made a pointed reference to the fact that he's a little tall for the cheese-triangle shaped PVC pipe walker-style aids they hand out to little kids. Mac caved then, allowing her to pull him out onto the varnished floor, going slow and giving patient pointers while he tried to figure out this new, unnatural kind of movement.

It's nice to see, both the encouraging smile on Riley's face and the determined frown on Mac's, the way their hands are locked together in the air between them as she guides him forward and he goes easily along and lets her. They've picked up a little speed by now, at least compared to where they'd started, and despite his initial reluctance, it's clear Mac is having fun.

"This was a good idea."

Apropos of nothing, Bozer's statement comes out of the clear blue sky. Jack turns his attention towards him and notes that he looks relaxed and happy. The tension is gone from his shoulders and Jack is reminded abruptly of the night before, of how Bozer had stood by the railing out on his back porch, hand pressed to his side and shook like he was moments from falling apart. He looks lightyears away from that upset, frightened young man now, and Jack allows himself a moment of indulgent, self-satisfied warmth at having played any part in pulling him away from that, dulling the pain of their impossible lives even for a few hours.

"Yeah," he agrees. "It was."

After a while, Jack starts to be able to tell that, while she displays absolutely no impatience with Mac and his slow but steady progress, Riley is absolutely itching to turn loose. He remembers watching her soar around the rink when she was younger, and knows how much she must want to now, and decides to step in and give her a break. With a nod to Bozer, he turns and skates over to them, coming smoothly to a stop next to where they've paused, Riley telling Mac something about the toe stop at the front of his skate.

"Why don't you let me take over for a while," he says, keeping his voice light and casual. "Show everybody here how a real pro does it."

Mac seems hesitant at the idea, eyes flicking back and forth between them, but any reluctance melts away from his face when he sees the way Riley's lights up at the idea. Jack holds out an arm towards him and Mac, though he pauses for a second when Riley starts to let go, eventually latches onto him, fingers digging into Jack's bicep while his other hand comes to clutch the sleeve at his forearm.

Once she's handed her charge off and is reasonably sure that Mac isn't about to topple over at any second, waiting for both he and Jack to giver her encouraging nods, Riley is gone. She's off like she was fired from a rocket, plastic wheels clacking against the floor as she gains momentum. It's a little dizzying to watch her go, hair flying out behind her and too-big shirt billowing in the wind generated by her quick acceleration, and the echo of her delighted laugh is like music in Jack's ears.

Back to their right somewhere, Bozer's deadpan, "Damn," expresses what Jack would assume they're all thinking, and Mac lets out a low whistle.

_That's my girl,_ Jack thinks, happier in this moment than he thinks he has been in a long time.

After the switch, Bozer pulls on ahead of them while Jack takes it slow and easy, careful not to try and get Mac to go faster than he's able to. They're not even up to the speed Mac and Riley had reached, because while Jack is good he's not that good, and there's no way he'd be able to pull off skating backwards. He figures it's better to let them both find their equilibrium, taking it one moment at a time.

Not a minute later, Jack is distracted from the warm glow of watching Riley zoom around the far bend when Mac almost falls. There's a heart-stopping moment when the grip on his arm gets abruptly much tighter, Mac's legs nearly going out from under him in a sudden, panicked flail. Jack stops and uses the hand not currently seized in a vice grip to catch Mac easily by the wildly flapping elbow, steadying him and giving him a moment to calm. They're close enough now that Jack can feel the way he's breathing, quick and shallow. Startled, maybe even scared.

"It's okay," Jack says, keeping his voice carefully calm and steady. Reassuring. "I've got you. Not gonna let you fall, okay? Promise. I've got you."

The promise is about this particular moment, is about roller skating, but it's also not about roller skating at all. And Jack hopes that, when Mac briefly closes his eyes and nods, grip relaxing just slightly, his agreement is about something more than roller skating too.

When he makes eye contact with a striped-shirt wearing rink employee who gives him the universal raised eyebrow of 'do you need help,' Jack shakes his head slightly. It takes them just a few more moments of standing there, still, for Mac to get his bearings about him once more, hand slipping back away from Jack's to its original position at his sleeve. The flush on his face looks ashamed, maybe of the near-fall, or maybe of the adrenaline spike of panic it induced in him and how instinct led him to grab onto Jack's hand. Either way, Jack decides the best course of action is to breeze past it like nothing happened at all.

"Ready to keep going?" he asks, then thinks better of it, and tacks on, "You don't have to, you know. You can go sit down if you want. I'll go with you, we can count how many times Riley laps Bozer."

Even as he says it they're able to watch it happen. Riley slows as she rounds another curve, coming up behind Bozer to pull his sweatshirt hood over his head and half his face as she passes him. His indignant squawk and waving arms nearly send him crashing to the ground, but he keeps his balance and yanks the hood back down. Though it's obviously not possible, Bozer tries to catch up to her to enact some kind of retaliation, and Riley's laugh echoes as she easily evades him.

Watching this unfold, Mac chuckles, and then stands up a little straighter. He only sways slightly on his skates before steadying, his face determined again like Jack had seen before, when Riley had him by the hands, leading him around the rink.

"No," he says firmly. "Let's keep going."

By the time they're all tired out, milling around the collection of tables off the rink itself, Mac is actually doing pretty well. There's nothing, Jack would hazard a guess, watching he and Bozer walk over to return their skates, that Mac couldn't pick up if he put his mind to it.

From his left, doing up the laces of her street shoes, cheeks still bright and reddened from exercise and excitement, what Riley says in the moments they're left alone takes Jack by surprise.

"Do you remember the Pizza Palace?"

He looks down at her, absolutely no clue in his mind as to where she's going with this. "Remember it? Of course I remember it."

"It's right by here," Riley says, finishing doing up her shoe and standing up straight, meeting his eyes head-on with an expression that just barely fails to completely mask the vulnerability behind it. "And it's open. I checked."

"Are you…" What she's suggesting is obvious, but Jack still has a hard time believing it, and so he asks, "Are you sure?"

"Yes." Her voice is firm, like she's already had this conversation before in her head, already decided what she was going to say. "I'm sure."

Still, Jack wants to give her an out, and so he tries again, saying, "That's where we went…"

"Yeah." Nothing wavers in her words, though something goes softer in her expression, around her mouth and her eyes, and she looks younger now than she has since she stepped out of that car in Brazil. "I know. And I want to go there again, y'know. As a family."

If there had been a question before about their relationship, about whether the shift Jack was feeling was all in his head or if things really were getting easier between them, smoothing out into something like what he remembered and never dreamed he'd ever get back, that answered it completely. So he smiles at her, reaching up to take ahold of her shoulder, squeezing gently saying, "Okay. That sounds really nice."

When they get there, Jack doesn't really do much aside from stand back and watch. He doesn't know that he could if he tried, with so many memories washing over him, old and new. The feeling he'd felt that morning is back, the one from when he'd watched Mac walk out into the kitchen, haze of sleep still clinging to him. It's the feeling that for once, things were simple and easy and right.

Stood there at the stove, Jack had needed to look away sharply, overwhelmed in a sudden rush by the sound of Riley's teasing voice and Bozer's answering chuckle, the way the light had caught off Mac's blond hair and lit it up gold. He'd found himself thinking then, spatula in his hand and his eyes stinging in a way that had nothing to do with onions, of a job offer and a park, of Matty Webber handing him a cup of coffee and a folder.

_What did you do to me, Matty? What did you get me into?_ Jack had thought, and he thinks it again now, watching Riley stand at the food counter with Mac and Bozer jostling each other behind her. _What did you do to my life, and how can I ever repay you for that kind of gift?_

They wave him over then, and he walks at a quick pace to join them, settling down in the seat left open next to Mac. Riley and Mac are locked in a debate across the table over whether it was possible to cheat at some game Jack hadn't even caught the name of, with Bozer acting as something of a referee who was taking turns ganging up on one or the other of them. It's a pointless, silly argument, exactly the kind of thing you should be getting into with your friends over a table littered with pizza and pop in dinged up plastic cups.

While their voices wash over him, Riley's rising abruptly into an indignant pitch when Mac flicks an ice cube at her, Jack gets a little distracted, attention sweeping out past their table and over the rest of the room. He does a scan in a force of habit, clocking exits and other patrons, making sure there's nothing going on around them that shouldn't be. Everything seems clear and he settles again, field instincts quieted for the moment. It's probably overly paranoid, but experience and a couple of different therapists have taught Jack by now that sometimes it's better to give in to some smaller impulses, if it helps preserve one's overall peace of mind.

From somewhere over to Jack's left there's a bright, happy sound, one that causes him to turn his head and look for the source. It's Mac. He's laughing, shoulders jerking unevenly and dimples etched into his grinning face. His eyes are shut closed, wrinkled at the corners with laughter lines, and suddenly, Jack can see it as clear as if it were right in front of him. The kid Mac had been, once upon a time, what he must have been like at three, seven, fourteen, nineteen years old. This thought turns into another like the pages of a novel, Jack indulging himself in a moment of vindictive, aching fantasy.

He looks over at the door across the room that leads out back onto the street and imagines opening it and stepping through into another decade, into a grief-empty house. He imagines looking at the child sitting alone on the couch, the little boy who'd just lost his mother, and deciding, _Not this time. I'm not going to let this happen to you._ Jack can see himself picking the child up and putting him in the backseat of the car, driving for the Canadian border and never looking back, stealing the kid he hadn't remotely known about back then into a different future, one where Jack wasn't so surprised to hear him laugh, loud and uninhibited, that for a moment he'd not even _recognized_ the sound.

"Something on the wall over there, Jack?" The words are unsteady with the leftover trembling of breathless mirth, voice unmistakable.

Jack looks back and there's Mac, twenty-four years old, terrible scar carved into the side of his neck, the edge of it visible creeping up past his collar, worse damage still raw and exposed-nerve fresh invisible somewhere buried down inside him. Sitting across from Riley and Bozer, looking his age for once, he's everything he deserves the chance to be, young and happy, wearing Jack's bright green Stars hoodie and that bright dimpled smile.

"No," he says, smiling back at his partner and softly quelling the pang he feels as he dismisses the version of Mac he'd never known in favor of focusing on the one in front of him, the one he still might be able to help. "Nothing at all."


	39. Lean In And Let It Hurt

_[announcer voice] and now, folks, for what we've all been waiting for..._

_i'm so excited and so nervous to be posting this chapter. i hope you enjoy it, but be aware there are pretty strong warnings attached, so be careful._

_chapter warnings: murdoc is his own warning honestly, but add to that some moderately graphic violence (nothing exceeding show-level) and serious psychological violence, including taunting about abuse. later, frank and extensive discussion of abuse._

* * *

Mac never feels quite so glad that James hardly ever goes into the field as he is on missions when James joins them in the field. The air has been thick with tension and awkward discomfort since they departed Los Angeles bound for San Miguel, El Salvador on a find-and-retrieve mission. Their target is a high ranking member of a homegrown terror cell out of the American heartland, someone even the FBI's most wanted list doesn't have ahold of the dossier on. Devin Rask just barely evaded a DXS team sent to hunt him down in Nebraska, and now his whereabouts have been tracked to a run-down sector of San Miguel slated for renovation and redevelopment in the coming months.

With any amount of luck, it'll be a quick in and out, just locate and grab Rask then head home. Mac sits in the car with James driving, Jack in the backseat behind him, and tries not to look at either of them. The tension that's been present the whole time seems louder in the enclosed space, not just between Mac and James, but between Jack and James too. And it's not just about how much his partner very obviously doesn't like his dad, and the extent to which the feeling is returned.

Mac is also unable to shake the sense that, just like every time there's been something he's kept from his father, James is going to find out about the investigation at any moment, now that Mac knows about it. Either that or Mac is going to turn around at some point to discover James already knew, and has just been letting him dig himself in deeper and deeper by pretending everything is fine.

This mission is the longest stretch of time they've spent together since he was brought in on what Jack, Matty, and Riley have been up to. More than once, Mac has caught himself on the verge of blurting it all out, flighting down the instinct to tell James everything with no small amount of effort. It's something he's had trained into him since he can remember, that the only way to lessen James's anger was to confess it to him before he could discover it, light the pyre himself before his father is forced to do it.

This time, though, he doesn't. Mac successfully reigns it in, because he knows that James will absolutely lose his mind over this one, but even more than the threat of that, he cannot stomach the idea of doing that to Jack and Riley, or even to Matty. So he ignores the part of him panicking and telling him that James is going to find out one way or another and the only way to avoid making it worse is to own up now, pushes through it, and keeps his head down and his mouth shut.

Luckily, the trip to El Salvador from California was far from the longest they've ever gone on, and one perk of having the Director with you on a mission is your intel and support services are top priority. This means that, by the time they touch down in San Miguel, Rask has already been tracked to a specific street. Now, why James insisted on tagging along on this mission in the first place is anybody's guess, as it's far from highly complicated and certainly not the most important assignment they've had recently.

Except, it isn't really Mac's guess at all. He has a solid hunch he knows why - it's the same reason he always does. James doesn't go on field missions at all unless there's a chance of Walsh's involvement, or someone in the area with connections to him, proven or rumored. It's why he'd taken off right after the tragedy in Sarajevo, spent the next week or so probably combing through Bosnia looking for Walsh, who he's still convinced had been the one to leave that note. This time, James hasn't said anything to Mac about it directly, which he tries not to read too much into. Sometimes Mac is read in, sometimes he isn't. It depends on the day and on whether James has a specific task for him.

As they approach their designated street, Mac has never been so glad to get the order to split up, because while it means he won't be working directly with Jack, and that makes him more nervous than he's entirely excited to realize, it also means that he won't be working with James. And, maybe most importantly, Jack won't be working with James either.

Standing on the sidewalk around which stretches the three buildings they've identified as possibly being Rask's hide-out, Jack tries to argue the point for a minute. Not surprisingly, James overrules him basically immediately, and as soon as his back is turned, Mac risks rolling his eyes at his partner.

Despite the initial relief at the order, Mac can't help but not like the actual experience much either. There's a moment when he first actually loses sight of Jack inside his designated building where Mac feels a small spike of panic jump to life in his chest like the tracking line of a heart monitor. It only lasts for that moment, though, because in the very next one comms go live, and Jack's voice is in his ear grumbling about the debris he's already running into looking like, "a Home Depot a year and a half into the zombie apocalypse."

Even as James's transmitted voice responds, icily requesting, "five minutes of professionalism, Dalton, please," it helps Mac feel more at-ease to know that even if he can't see him, Jack is still there, and still incorrigibly Jack.

Starting into his own assigned building, the back of Mac's neck prickles and his hand flexes uneasily around the flashlight he's just switched on. He's got a bad feeling about this, all of a sudden, beginning out on the street and ramping up the farther inside he goes. Just for something to say, to remind himself he isn't actually here in this place alone, he makes an offhand comment while starting up the stairs about how creepy it is without any lighting. Nobody answers, which is probably for the best as he can't imagine James is thrilled with his commentary, but it's unnerving nevertheless.

It's especially unsettling in light of what he can remember Riley saying before they left her at their established temporary base with her surveillance setup. They hadn't really had a good excuse to bring her with them into the field, not with James right there, and so they'd been forced to leave her behind, something none of them had felt good about doing. She'd caught Mac by the wrist as he was heading after James and Jack for the car, and told him to be careful. Riley said, brows furrowed and voice quietly troubled, that she felt like something was wrong, and they were being watched.

Mac felt it too, he couldn't lie to her about that, but he'd chalked it up to the presence of James with them, and told her as much. He promised he'd keep an eye out anyway before he left, and though he's done so, there hasn't been any indication that it's anything other than James that's throwing either of them off. Until now, as the feeling mounts, and Mac finds himself looking over his shoulder and darting his eyes around rooms even after he's cleared them, wondering what he's missing.

On the third floor of what used to be an office building but is now just an abandoned property awaiting renovation and relisting on the market, Mac is rounding a corner by the stairwell when it happens. There's a blow to the back of his head that's hard enough he sees stars and his arm, the one he'd dislocated not that long ago, is pulled up and wrenched behind his back. The angle puts enormous pressure on the still residually healing joint as he's forced face-first into the wall, and it hurts so bad he can barely see or think. The flashlight clatters to the floor in a pinwheel of light until it rolls against the far wall and settles there.

"Angus MacGyver." It's hissed into Mac's ear in a soft, velvet smooth voice that sounds just this side of excited. "I've been waiting for this moment for some time now."

Mac tries to say something, to call out for Jack to help him, but as soon as the strangled sound leaves him, his arm is twisted harder and whatever words he'd been about to say are cut off. He gasps, the pain shooting up to completely intolerable levels, and it's everything he can do not to scream. It's hard to tell what's making the panic soar to higher levels in his head, the person who has him pinned or the fact that Jack doesn't answer.

"Now," the person, a man if the pitch of his voice and the fact that the voice is coming from somewhere indicating he's taller than Mac is anything to go by, says in that same sybillant near-whisper, "before you try and go sounding the alarm, there's a few things you should probably know. The first is that I have here in my pocket a handy little gadget that's currently blocking your ability to transmit. Information gets in but it doesn't go out, so your team cannot hear you."

They hadn't answered him, back on the stairs. It's a jolting realization that, from the moment he's set foot in this building, Mac doesn't actually have a moment he can refer back to in order to prove they've heard a word he's said at all.

"The second is that I have cloned the signal of your earpiece, so that when you get the inevitable check-in sound off, I will know. The third is that I have available to me not only your home address, but darling Wilt Bozer's work schedule and a contact in Los Angeles who has a gun and owes me a favor."

If the force of being pushed so hard into the wall wasn't enough to do it, that would've driven any last cubic inch of air out of Mac's lungs. The grip on his arm eases somewhat as he reels, trying to process the completely nonsensical situation he's found himself in, letting the pain ebb until it's not quite so blinding. Only a few moments later, the predicted call does come through, Jack's voice in his ear requesting a check in."

"Now, are you going to behave?" the man behind him asks, the grip he has on Mac's wrist going slightly tighter, a threat that punctuates his point.

"Yes," Mac grinds out, because whoever this is and whatever he wants, there is no way he's going to risk Bozer's life on the off chance that this man, who knows their names and far too much about them, is bluffing. There's a click of a switch being flipped somewhere out of Mac's line of sight, just as James's voice comes through the earpiece, an irritated snap of, "_Angus,"_ clearly indicating that Mac has taken too long to answer.

"All good here," he forces himself to say, hoping his voice comes out as normal as he's trying to make it sound. "Nothing so far."

Another click sounds and Mac knows with a sickening drop of his stomach that he's alone again, alone in this gutted, drafty building with… First thing's first, it might actually be a good idea to figure out just who the hell this is, since it seems like the man doesn't plan on killing him right away. Information is power, and right now, he has none.

"Doesn't seem really fair," Mac says, steadying as he focuses in on the immediate plan of action, "that you know my name but I don't know yours."

"Fair. You really are too funny. Such a boy scout, talking about _fair."_

The grip on his arm disappears in a flash and the man grabs him by the collar of the shirt, spinning Mac around so that his back is now to the wall, facing his assailant. The man is disconcertingly pale, with black hair and dark, piercing eyes that focus on him intensely. He's narrow but strong, going by the force with which Mac had been pinned, and there's a gun in his hand, casually pointed at the hollow at the base of Mac's throat.

"I guess it can't do much harm though," he muses in that odd, lilting voice. "I've had an awful lot of names over the years, but at the moment I'm particularly fond of Murdoc."

"Alright, Murdoc, now explain to me what the hell it is you want from me." Snapping at the person holding a gun on you is probably not the world's smartest plan, but at this point, if Murdoc is going to shoot him then he's going to shoot him, and being polite probably won't change that one way or another.

"Want from you? Oh, not much at all. Just your attention. I've been watching you for a while, now, and decided it was time for us to finally meet. See this," he uses the gun to gesture between them, like it's a prop, like it couldn't easily go off and send a violent projectile through either one of them on the flip of a coin, obliterate anything in its path, "this was never supposed to happen. Our relationship. But you're just too good an opportunity to pass up. It's been a long time since I've met anyone even half so… compelling."

"Our _relationship?_ We don't have a relationship, I don't even _know_ you." Mac can't help it. The more this man- _Murdoc_ talks like there's anything between them but right now, the more he talks like he knows Mac, the more Mac wants to run. He wants to get away, to crawl out of his own skin, but he can't, and so the best he has as far as a way to distance himself goes is his words, rejecting the idea outright.

In a flash, Mac could've sworn the expression on Murdoc's face went momentarily hurt. He tuts softly, then says, "Oh, but we do, Angus, we _do_ have a relationship, because you may not know me, but I know you. And that's why it was so important for us to meet. See I had my suspicions right from the start, when I began gathering information, when I saw you in Amsterdam and then when you saved your oafish bodyguard out there from the Ghost. But after I had my chance stolen in Bosnia, I watched you so much more closely, and I just knew I had to meet you. Cat and mouse is a much less interesting game when the mouse doesn't even know you're there chasing him. The fear is half the fun."

"Bosnia…" The note. That note, left with the dead college student's body, the one saying to 'tell MacGyver' that next time he should come himself. It _had_ been aimed at Mac, after all, not some kind of taunt from Walsh like James had been so convinced it was. "That was you."

"Surprise," Murdoc sing-songs, teeth flashing white as he grins through the low-light gloom. "Imagine my intrigue when not a day later, your dear old dad lands in Sarajevo. I knew I had to watch you both so much closer after that, and my, what I found." He whistles, low and mocking. Mac is quickly beginning to hate this man more than just about anyone he's ever met, and it's only been a few minutes. "I was just hooked. You two are so… spectacularly dysfunctional, it's better than daytime TV, and you especially, Angus, _you…_ You are just going to be too fun to play with. That's why I couldn't just kill you outright, no matter what the contract said."

_Contract,_ Mac thinks, noting this piece of actually useful information, plucked from Murdoc's generally unhinged ranting. Unhinged ranting which, evidently, isn't done, because he keeps going, saying something that makes Mac's heart kick oddly.

"You know, I heard somewhere that once someone is brainwashed once, it's easier to do it again. Do you think that's true?"

The implication is obvious and Mac grits his teeth. He ignores the odd tight feeling in his chest and, not quite sure why he's bothering to argue with somebody who is obviously just trying to mess with him, "I'm not brainwashed."

Murdoc smiles at him again, this time dripping with condescending pity. "And I'm sure it helps you to believe that."

Quicker than anything, his hand suddenly flashes back, the intent to crack across Mac's face in a hard slap obvious in the movement. It's so fast and so against the almost casual tone of Murdoc's general demeanor, changing in a flash of a moment, that Mac can't reign in the flinch. His eyes snap shut and he inhales sharply in preparation for the blow, head knocking back into the wall in an uncontrollable instinctive move out of the way. It doesn't come

When he opens his eyes again Murdoc is grinning, excited and bright-eyed.

"Can't you see how well trained he has you?" The still-raised hand lowers slowly and Mac forces himself to hold still this time, not jerk out of the way when Murdoc pats him on the cheek twice, light and demeaning. "Didn't even have to use his fists to beat you into shape, did he? Bet he'd even be furious if he knew how you brace for it, _expect_ it. Wouldn't want to damage his reputation as a father."

It yanks itself out of Mac's mouth, angry and too-loud, undercut with a note of panic sewn there by the words, "You don't know _anything_ about me or about my dad." It was a viscerally descriptive characterization of James and him, piercing and cruel, and Mac wants to bolt just to stop thinking about it, to get away from the implications. From Murdoc's language that had swung into him like a cudgel, _beat you into shape._

"Oh come on now," Murdoc says, mock-patiently like he's talking to a child having a difficult time grasping a homework concept. "I think you and I both know that's not true." He leans in closer, crowding Mac's space and speaking next to his ear. "I know everything. Even what you don't seem ready to admit."

Somewhere downstairs there's what Mac thinks is a faint clattering sound. He latches onto it immediately, looking towards the stairway and away from Murdoc, straining to hear more. Maybe it's Jack. Maybe this entire bizarre ordeal is about to be blessedly over.

"No one is coming to save you," Murdoc snaps, and then he's grabbed Mac's chin with hard, angry fingers. Squeezing brutally hard, Murdoc uses the iron grip to turn Mac's face back towards him, forcing eye contact. "And it is _so rude_ to ignore someone when they're speaking to you. I'm amazed that's a lesson James missed with you- or maybe you're just a slow learner." As he says it the grasp cinches impossibly tighter, and Mac holds his breath tight to avoid letting out a whimper.

"Now. Where was I." And just like that, the conversational tone is back, Murdoc letting go of his face and raising the gun again. "Right! I had just one more little piece of my message, something I need you to know, something very important to me. You didn't show in Bosnia, but the contract remained, Angus. I was supposed to kill you today. And I could have. Easily. I decided not to, and I want you to remember that. You lived today because I decided to let you."

The man's attitude flips again before Mac can brace himself for it, and then he's on the floor, Murdoc having shoved the gun into a holster in favor of grabbing Mac by the shirt and spinning him, tossing him across the room. The landing is hard enough to drive the breath out of Mac again. He's just heaving himself up, braced on one hand and an elbow when the first kick lands, taking his arm out from under him and sending him back down in a heap. A second kick follows the first and it's all he can do to curl up, shielding his head with his arms.

It's only because of an instinct telling him to move, rolling with the moment of impact, that Mac avoids getting half his ribcage caved in when Murdoc rears back and tries to stomp on him. It still lands hard, though, and the downward drive of the boot is enough to leave Mac completely winded, coughing violently and trying to catch his breath. He's still laying there, chest heaving and bracing for whatever's about to come next, when he notices the blows stopped after that one.

By the time his vision clears and he can get up, he realizes both James and Jack are trying to get his attention over comms. Mac forces his body, which feels like one big throbbing bruise, slowly to its feet and starts after where Murdoc has to have gone, determined not to let the attack deter him from going after the man. He makes it downstairs and runs into Jack and James just outside, evidently having come after him when he didn't answer their calls for too long.

Immediately, the moment he puts eyes on his partner, Mac wants to run to him. He wants to let his exhausted, beaten body collapse and let Jack catch him. Let Jack hold him and tell him he's safe, to know he'll be protected even if Murdoc and his evident obsession, his stalking and incomprehensible taunts about James, were to come back. Mac can literally feel the sob as it builds in the back of his throat, fear and confusion and anger snarling around each other inside him in a multicolored ball of yarn that clogs his lungs and threatens to choke him.

Except that Jack isn't the only person there. And so Mac pulls himself up short, making the split second decision that they can't know. His ribs might be broken and pain is pulsing where he'd initially been struck in a way that threatens a concussion but he can't say anything. Not while James is right there too.

If Mac admits he's been hurt, then James will grab him to get a look at the injuries, and Mac thinks that if he's manhandled by his father right now, grabbed and turned this way and that without regard for whether he wants to be touched and by who, he might actually lose it completely. So he holds himself rigid and distant and explains in a breathless clip that there had been somebody in the building and he'd been attacked, but it was over quickly and the man got away.

James turns, following the direction of Mac's pointing finger and beginning to snap something to Riley over comms. As he does so, Jack looks at Mac. He reaches out just slightly, open palm asking the same question his eyes are, and Mac quickly shakes his head, then swallows a sound when the movement makes his headache surge.

They're too late to catch up to Murdoc. That much is obvious and not a surprise, as Mac has no idea how much time he'd lost laying on the floor trying to get his body to remember how to breathe. He explains it to them as best he can, gives a brief description of the narrow, dark-haired man. Though it's almost definitely an alias, he tells them the name Murdoc too, and that he'd known far too much, including the part where he'd said he was watching Mac and the rest of the team too for some time now.

There's a lot Mac leaves out. The majority of the physical violence and the content of the words exchanged stay with him, guarded close to the vest where James can't begin to guess at their shape. He doesn't want to admit the details of what had happened there, and he'll certainly die before he repeats them to his father, before he looks the man in the face and echoes Murdoc's words, the jab about how James-

_-didn't even have to use his fists to beat you into shape, did he?_

The trip home is mercifully short. Rask's base was discovered in the building Jack swept, and James waved off the suggestion that they stick around and finish the job, saying airily that the original team can be dispatched now that they've verified his whereabouts. They can be left to 'clean up their own mess,' as James describes it, and Mac doesn't have it in him to argue the point.

What's even stranger than leaving without completing the original mission they'd gone all that way to execute is James's reaction when Mac asks about who he'll be giving his statement to when they get back and which sketch artist they'll be using. James waves that off too and tells him that it can wait, and Mac's eyes narrow in confusion. He sees the same looks on Jack and Riley's faces when he glances over at them, though their confusion is tinged with a lot more suspicion as well.

Something is definitely odd here, but Mac can't say he's sad about this version of plans. The last thing he wants to do right now is an interview. He doesn't want to sit in a cold room with James and some stranger to describe the man who'd beat him after taunting him with accusations about the admittedly deeply messed up relationship he has with his father. Especially not with his father sitting right next to him.

Riley seems like she believes Mac is as fine as he says he is even less than Jack does, but she doesn't push. She lets it go willingly, though Mac strongly believes that has more to do with Jack than anything else, whatever it is Jack says to her when he pulls her aside as they leave the plane. James goes ahead to his own car before they can say much of anything else, and Mac is once again confused. He's torn disorientingly as he watches James's retreating back, not sure if he should feel relieved or bereft now that he's gone.

Walking to the remaining car is hard and getting harder, every step a struggle as Mac's head still pounds and his ribs are jarred harshly every time he moves. He knows there's a non-zero chance something in his torso is broken, possibly badly, and he knows he can likely figure that out himself - it's not as if he hasn't before - but… Something gives him pause this time. Stopping just before getting into the vehicle, he looks at Jack, and Jack looks back at him, Riley looking between both of them, and imagines lying about this, only to find he just can't do it.

Not this time. Not any more.

So when they're in the car, after they've dropped Riley off, he tells Jack, "Not my place. Is it alright if- Can we go back to yours? There's something I need your help with."

Jack agrees without demanding further explanation in the moment. As he turns the wheel of the car away from the road that would take them towards Mac and Bozer's house, onto the one that will lead them to Jack's, it feels like something under Mac's feet has shifted, the world tilting and settling on its new axis.

Even before it happens, Jack has a suspicion he knows what this is going to be about. The first thing he does when they get inside, after Mac's odd request led them both back here rather than dropping him off home, is situate Mac at the kitchen table. The light is better there than anywhere else in the apartment except for the bathroom, which is on the small side, and there's something he'd noticed in the car.

"Hey," he says, careful to keep his voice gentle and far from accusatory. "Can you look at me for a second? Something I wanna get a peek at here."

Mac does as he's told immediately, easy and compliant in the tilting of his head in a way that sends a jolt of apprehensive fear through Jack. The more Mac trusts him, the more power he has, and it's a responsibility he doesn't look on lightly, even just in getting him to turn his face towards the light.

The odd marks on his face haven't faded. What Jack had initially assumed were smudges of dirt from whatever scuffle he'd been involved in have survived Mac washing his face on the plane, standing out now against the unnatural pale of his jawline. Frowning, Jack steps closer and crouches down, studying the marks. From the way he's looking down it's hard to get a good look, but there seem to be one larger spot low on the right side of his face, with three more on the left that are darker towards his chin, fading as they go farther back.

Waiting for Mac to notice and ensuring he's tracking what's happening, Jack reaches out and takes ahold of his chin, gently turning his face up to get a better look at the discoloration, and as he does, his heart lurches. When he tilts Mac's face up, Jack's touch has slipped into the exact placement of what he abruptly realizes are bruises. His thumb covers the larger mark on the right and his fingers line up perfectly with the ones that grow fainter as his grip grows weaker, and Jack lets go like he's been burned.

Fingermark bruises. There are fingermark bruises on Mac's face where someone has grabbed his jaw hard enough to leave marks, and Jack feels sick. Whatever happened when he was alone in that building with the person who'd attacked him, it's far worse than he'd told them when James asked. Before Jack can ask again now, in a move that startles him more than just about anything else could have at the moment, Mac voluntarily tells him.

"It's worse," he says, and his voice is quiet and awkward. "It's worse than I told you, and I think... I think I need help."

"Okay." Jack tries to sound calm and even as possible, like this is totally normal. Like Mac just hasn't taken a massive, monumental step, like Jack isn't nervous beyond belief. "Can you show me, and we'll go from there?"

Mac stands up and leans back against the table itself, which is more than sturdy enough to hold his weight, and starts unbuttoning the front of his flannel shirt. He lifts the shirt he has on under it enough that Jack can see the damage, and it sends his heart rocketing into his throat when he does. As if the fingermarks on his face hadn't been bad enough, there is what is unmistakably an honest-to-God footprint on his side, just over the bottom of the left half of his ribcage.

"He kicked you," Jack says flatly. He feels almost numb as Mac nods.

"He had me on the ground and kicked me, got my side and my shoulder, the bad one, and uh… stomped on me. A bit." Jack's stomach lurches, and Mac adds quickly, "But I rolled so it wasn't as bad as it could've been, and um. I think he hit me with a gun."

"Hit you with a gun," Jack repeats, faint and shallow. The room feels like it's gotten smaller around them, walls shrinking as it all sinks in.

"Yeah, he had one and when he first found me he hit me in the head with something pretty hard, so it makes sense it was probably the gun, y'know." It sounds like Mac is trying so hard to be casual about this, to recount the attack as if it were nothing, but it doesn't exactly work. Not all the way.

_Hit you with a gun,_ Jack thinks again, but manages not to actually say out loud. Instead he just nods and tries to process this information, catalogue it into a list of potential injuries to be concerned about. It ends up looking something like broken ribs, _really_ broken ribs, further shoulder damage, concussion.

Once Mac's shirt is fully off, a task that takes both of them considering the difficult time Mac is having lifting his arms very high, Jack is able to see that the shoulder is probably okay. He feels around it just to be sure, gently manipulating the joint and asking a few questions, and ultimately decides it's just going to be very bruised in the morning. Moves on to the ribs, Jack presses with firm but gentle hands, open palm and flat fingers pushing over bone that thankfully, mercifully doesn't give or shift the way it would if they were really in trouble.

The whole time, Jack talks. He keeps up a steady stream of words, narrating for Mac what it is he's doing before he does it like he's teaching a beginning EMT class, throwing in anecdotes from his own life between the warnings. And as he does this, as he talks and conducts the exam, Mac shakes. It starts subtly, a slight shiver going through him when Jack first makes contact, but it increases steadily as things go on. Mac shakes harder, and his breathing gets ragged in a way that Jack has a sneaking suspicion has nothing to do with pain.

Jack's fingers are in his hair, carefully feeling for blood or raised lumps left behind by the gun, when he says it, unprompted and surprising in its bluntness.

"I didn't say anything because I didn't want him to know."

Continuing what he's doing, Jack reigns in anything he could have to say to that, letting Mac have the room to react however he needs to.

"If he'd known I was hurt," Mac goes on, voice tired and quiet, "he would've ordered me to show him and he wouldn't have taken no for an answer, and I didn't- I didn't want him _grabbing_ me, that's all. I'm sorry I lied. I didn't want to lie to you."

Jack's hand slips down from his head to the back of his neck, no longer searching for damage but just holding, feeling a different kind of damage against his touch as Mac continues to tremble. It pulses in his chest like the beating of his heart, _I didn't want to lie to you,_ and despite the circumstances, the words are precious. They don't sound like obligation, like a fear of retribution, they sound like something else. Something Jack doesn't quite know how to name, but has been fighting for almost as long as they've worked together.

"What's important is that you told me, as soon as it was safe to," Jack tells him, and Mac cringes at that characterization. He probably would've pulled back and looked away entirely if it weren't for Jack's hand still holding him by the nape of his neck. "Thank you for doing that. For telling me, I know that was hard."

Mac swallows hard and nods and doesn't say anything more.

The exam is concluded without discovery of major injury. None of Mac's ribs are broken and his shoulder hasn't been majorly damaged, and as far as Jack can tell, he isn't concussed either. He's going to be in a world of hurt when he wakes up with those bruises tomorrow, but it's better than the alternative. Which means now Jack has nothing left to do but ask the one question he's been dreading at the same time he knows he has to do it. There can't be any more putting it off.

He lets Mac walk into the living room, re-buttoning his shirt without help, with the kind of determination that says he needs to do _something_ for himself today. Jack follows and waits until he's settled sitting on the couch to approach, finding his own place on the edge of the coffee table. There's something about Mac right now that seems like a live wire, raw and exposed and friable, and Jack can't stop thinking about it. The shaking. The way he'd sat there while Jack touched him and breathed with shallow, unsteady breaths, and barely spoke, and shook, and shook, and _shook._

"Do you remember the mission in hungary?" is how one of the hardest conversations of Jack's life starts. "With that scientist, Dr. Parker, I think?"

Mac nods like he can't find the point and Jack doesn't blame him. It's something of a non sequitur, but it seems better than just launching in with the real question.

"We had a talk outside, while we waited for Riley to do her thing, and I haven't been able to shake it since." He really hasn't. Not since the moment it happened has a week gone by that something hasn't reminded him. "Because we got to talking about your dad, and when I said I didn't feel right letting him hurt you in front of me, you got pretty worked up. Said he didn't hurt you, but thing is, I didn't believe that. Not then and not now. So I'm gonna ask, and I want you to know you can tell me the truth. Your dad, he hurts you, doesn't he?"

Mac's not shaking anymore. It's almost worse now, because he's gone still, so still Jack doesn't think he's breathing. The only part of him that moves is his throat and the muscles of his jaw, flexing and working as he tries to say something, or maybe to choke something down before he _can_ say it. The bruises on his face ripple with the gritting of his teeth, and Jack fights down the impulse to touch him again, to smooth a calloused, worn thumb over those marks like he could erase them just like that.

"He…" It's nearly airless when it comes out, a half-exhale of a word Mac struggles to allow past, dying into silence before he tries again. "He doesn't… my dad doesn't. He doesn't beat me, or anything like that. He's never hit me."

Jack's heart gives an almighty lurch and feels like it's tearing, atrium from ventricle. _That wasn't what I asked,_ he thinks. _I didn't ask if he hit you, kid, I asked if he hurt you, and if you have to give that specific of an answer, we both know what the truth is._ He doesn't say any of it though, because it's clear Mac isn't done yet. There's still more that needs to come out, and it's not going to if Jack cuts him off or pushes back now. They're far too close for him to risk that.

"He's never hit me but I've always-" Mac makes a sound that's almost like a small laugh but far too incredulous and wounded to ever be called that. "I've always known that he wants to, sometimes. He _wants_ to, and he never does, he doesn't even threaten that he will, and I don't know how to explain how I know but- I know." He shakes his head, hands knotted into tight fists in his lap, one arm coming up around his middle in an unconscious kind of self-hug. "I know it doesn't make sense, and I really can't explain it, but.." Mac trails off, cheeks going from pale to flushed as he falls silent.

And he's right. It doesn't make sense, and Jack can't understand it, this thing Mac is talking about. He would imagine that is the sort of thing it's impossible to describe by the very nature of it, to get somebody else to understand if they haven't known it themselves, felt what it was like first-hand. So no, he doesn't get it, and it doesn't make sense, but he's not the kind of person who limits the realm of his belief to his own lived experience.

So instead of trying to understand something he gets the feeling he can have no hope of understanding, not really, Jack just leans forward, catching Mac's gaze and saying merely, "I believe you."

"You… you believe me." It seems like Jack has identified one of the main problems, judging by the way Mac's eyes have gone huge and as hopeful as they are uncomprehending of the idea. At the thought that this won't be a fight, a battle to prove that what he's failed at describing was, nevertheless, real and terrifying.

"Yeah. I believe you."

Mac's shoulders hitch and jerk like he's about to burst into sobs and Jack starts to reach out, ready to catch him and hold him as long as it takes, but at the last moment he seems to snap himself together. His arms are back folded tightly over his stomach and jaw set. His eyes are bright and brimming, embarrassed and angry at the same time, and staring at the wall over Jack's shoulder, and he sounds like the cadets in basic trying to be big tough soldiers when he says, "I'm sorry. It doesn't- it doesn't matter, I'm sorry, this is ridiculous, I should… it's not like he's- or I'm-"

It takes Jack a second to breathe through the way this feels. He's been shot more than once and this is worse than each one of them. Without question. Then, when he knows he can speak and sound at all steady, he decides to try something.

"Okay sit with me on a hypothetical for a moment," he proposes, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his call phone. "I got a nephew about your age, right? He's in vet school, bright kid, name's Evan. good kid, see, this is him." Jack holds up the phone, a picture on the screen of his sister Laurie's oldest.

"I know what you're doing-" starts Mac, voice going stiff and slightly exasperated, and Jack waves the phone slightly, a shallow movement without a hint of a threat. He interrupts before Mac can finish the sentence.

"Why don't you hush and let me do it then, huh? Now, say I found out something was happening to him. That his dad was just godawful mean to him pretty much all the time, humiliated him and controlled him, ignored him one moment and went on and on about all the ways he wasn't ever good enough the next."

It hurts to say, and it's obvious it's hurting Mac to hear, but he has to say it. The truth of it, as ugly and sharp edged as it is, has to lay out between them in order to validate the reality Mac lives in, the reality he doesn't seem to think anyone else ever sees or believes in. It hurts for the thought of it happening to his nephew, too, but Jack doesn't think either of them could stomach Riley or Bozer in this analogy so Evan has to do.

Later, Jack will call his sister later just to talk to her, and he'll speak to his brother in law as well, just to remind himself it's all a story. For Mac, though, it isn't a story. It's not a what-if, or a hypothetical. It's real, and so this has to happen.

"Would you tell me that it didn't matter cause he hadn't been hit yet? That I shouldn't help him or believe he'd been abused until he had bruises he could show me?"

And there it is, that word, out in the open. Mac hears it and his face twists, shaking his head before Jack has even finished the rhetorical question.

"That's not… my dad isn't…" His hand goes up to his face and back down just as fast and he's shaking again. They're so close. Jack can see it in him, and so he pushes again, far enough that he hopes whatever Mac has bound so tight down in himself will break out and breathe free.

"You hid what could've been serious injuries until we were alone because the thought of him knowing, the thought of him touching you, was worse than the thought of untreated broken ribs or a head injury. You just tried to defend him by saying he doesn't knock you around, you just know he _wants_ to, which is… it's horrifying, Mac, to hear that. Because it _is _abuse. He hurts you, and he's been hurting you for a long time. I've been watching it happen since the day we met."

Mac crumples in on himself at the same time that Jack gets off the coffee table to come and sit next to him. He turned towards Mac with one leg tucked up under himself, posture completely open and focused. Despite every instinct to reach out and grab, Jack forces himself to move slow and allow Mac to make the decisions. He holds his arm out over the back of the couch and nearly knocked breathless with relief when Mac practically falls into it.

It's not quite clear to Jack whether the shaking has gotten significantly worse or if it just seems that way because he can feel it now in his arms while the rest of the world's gone still. He's turned with his back half out towards the rest of the room, Mac twisted similarly against the couch until he's nearly between it and Jack. Hidden there, sheltered and safe. There's a strange shift against his shirt and Jack realizes that it's Mac nodding, the jerky up and down of his chin as he silently agrees, admitting the truth.

"I just… I need you to know that I see. I see it, and I see you, and I see what he's doing to you, and it's not okay."

There's a sound below where his cheek is pressed against shaggy blond hair, though Jack isn't quite able to make it out. He doesn't have to wonder long, as Mac says it again, gasps it out as he unfolds one arm from around himself and uses it to hang on, to dig fingers into Jack's back just below his shoulder blade.

"It hurts. Jack, it _hurts."_

"I know," Jack reassures him. His throat feels like there's glass lodged in it, shredding and hot.

It's an odd thought that crosses his mind then, his mother standing outside his little sister's hospital room, thumb stroking the glass of the window over where the girl's face was. He'd stood next to her still in his uniform, having come straight from the plane, and asked her how she was holding up. Twenty minutes passed before she answered. _It destroys and remakes you, being a parent,_ she says, in the memory and in the back of Jack's mind now. Kathleen Dalton's eyes had shone in agonized love, looking older than he'd ever seen her look in his life, and Jack had wondered, young and brash and foolish, why anyone would ever do that to themselves.

"It hurts," Mac's muffled voice says again, pleads like he's been screaming it for years and no one's been able to hear before, and Jack promises him again, "I know."

There's nothing about this that doesn't hurt, but Jack has been around the block enough time to recognize a healing hurt. The kind of hurt that comes from reopening the wound to clear the infection out, the kind he hopes there's more of now than the other kind. Jack feels Mac take a deep, choking breath in his arms, his own eyes stinging and breathing labored and holds on more securely. Splays his fingers out over the side of Mac's head, cradles it against his collarbone, and repeats, intent and sincere, "I know. I see you, and I know it hurts. I see, and it isn't okay."


	40. Blessed With Bad Eyes

_so this... took a while. i forgot i had another chapter i'd put up on ao3 but not here. in my defense [waves at the world in general], and i also just got through finals and taking the law school admittance test so. finally got my groove back though so 41 should be coming before too much longer!_

_chapter warning: fairly descriptive section at the top of mac's shooting in sweden._

* * *

The ground under Mac's head is hard and cold. Water seeps through his hair and the sky above him is too bright, like Bozer is editing this scene and has turned the saturation levels up way too high. Mac is lying prone on the pavement, shivering in a way that has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the blood. It pulses through his fingers, clasped desperately over the side of his neck, in time to the beating of his fading heart, and he knows he's dying.

That's always the worst part. He always knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he's dying. That his life is going to end in this alley and no one is there to even _try_ to do something about it. Except… Mac knows that someone _should_ be. Someone should be here, he knows someone is supposed to be here. He can't see them, can't even move his neck enough to look around, but somehow he knows without having to that he's alone.

Eyes darting back and forth, all Mac can see is sky and brick walls rising on either side of him. He's bleeding and gasping and dying, there's a bullet mushroomed into the wall behind him where it landed after it tore through his body, and he's alone.

What feels like hours pass and then he blinks and Mac is in the hospital. He's in a hospital room with monitors beeping next to his shoulders, still unable to move. The side of his neck throbs with a dangerous, delicately pieced together ache and Mac is too scared to _try_ to move. If he rips his stitches he'll bleed out, like he almost did in the alley, and just like in the alley there's someone who's supposed to be here.

There's no one. Mac is alone and he doesn't have any stitches, he feels like he's burning and freezing at the same time. Monitors keep beeping and no one comes in to check on him or explain, nobody there to answer his questions, tell him if he's here for a gunshot or heatstroke or what year it is.

Mac's gaze drifts down and he sees that the cooling blankets that have been laid over him are starting to stain. The pale blue fabric, reminding him of the color of the baby blankets he's seen in hospital nurseries on TV, has a violent red patch, starting high by his right shoulder. It spreads as he watches and Mac knows what it is, but he can't move his hands. They're pinned down by his sides by the frigid, heavy coverings and he needs to move them, to try and stop the blood because he must have ripped his stitches and now he's bleeding out, he's going to bleed out if he doesn't-

When he wakes, it's with one hand flying up to grab at the side of his own neck and shoulder so frantically he accidentally scratches one fingernail over the underside of his chin, choking on air. Mac's eyes are open wide and his breathing is coming in shallow, uneven pants. For several long moments he lays there, still, clasping the scarred over remnant of what had once been a near-fatal injury, and tries to breathe through the panic.

There's no blood. Mac is not bleeding. The stitches are long gone. He's in California and he doesn't have heatstroke. And, Mac notices, when he finally manages to focus on those facts long enough to convince his still half-conscious brain to believe him, he isn't alone. Someone else is there with him, a vague shape he'd barely noticed when he'd first opened his eyes down close by his left shoulder.

As he looks over, Jack smiles at him, a little strained but genuine, and the hand braced on the cushion next to him shifts, reaching out and settling against his chest. For a moment, Mac expects it to hurt. His eyes shut tight again and he braces for… something, he doesn't know what. All he knows is that waking had brought with it a rush of pain, gripping his entire body but focused on his torso, and that's a precarious reality to live in when someone reaches out to touch your prone form.

But the hand doesn't grasp, or push, or otherwise disturb the bruises inked into Mac's skin under the button-up shirt he'd fallen asleep in last night. Jack doesn't try to pull Mac's own hand away from his neck, either, just settles his palm on Mac's chest, high and to the right, away from where the worst of the damage is concentrated. It rests there, pressing just slightly, thumb moving over his collarbone in rhythmic, gentle strokes.

In increments, Mac relaxes back into the couch, and the hand stays.

This is not the first time Mac has woken up like this. You'd think he'd be developing some kind of bad association with Jack's couch, this being the second time he's been jolted out of bad dreams there, waking into disoriented pain left behind by the previous day's violence. Except it isn't just the nightmares or the pain that's characterized both times Mac has fallen asleep and then woken on this couch. It's the warmth from the sunlight streaming down over him like a second blanket. It's the faint, distant sound of LA ninety-five point five playing on the radio in the kitchen. It's Jack, his voice and his hands, catching him and holding him when he's dumped abruptly into frightened consciousness.

It hadn't been a fluke, Mac finds himself musing. His eyes squeeze tight closed and he breathes deep and even, concentrating on the sun on his face, the press of Jack's palm on his chest. Calming. Settling. Thinking about patterns.

Waking up that day after his shoulder dislocation, here on this same couch, the way it had felt. The light and the warmth and the promise that someone would care for him… It wasn't a fluke. Once could be an accident. Twice is enough for a pattern. James has taught Mac over and over again - there are no coincidences.

The thought of James is enough to make him shudder, eyes snapping back open and searching for Jack, but still the hand stays, soothes him through it without asking what thought had prompted such a reaction. For someone who talks as much as Jack does, he sure seems to also have a strange ability to keep quiet when he chooses to. The silence sits softly, like a blanket rather than a slab of concrete to suffocate him with, and Mac can barely handle it. He has to look away from Jack, unable to keep making eye contact with him, not as the previous night crashes back down. Not when Jack is just kneeling there, next to the couch, saying nothing and maintaining that gentle, grounding pressure.

Jack doesn't try to make Mac look at him either. There's no irritated snap about disrespect, no click of fingers in front of his face, no lecture about paying attention to people when they're talking to you-

He's not talking, Mac reminds himself. Jack isn't talking, never mind demanding anything from him at all, and what's more, he isn't James. This isn't James. It's Jack. Mac is in Jack's apartment, on Jack's living room couch, with the light from the wide, high-set windows warming his face. Everything is calm and quiet and still. It's safe. He's safe.

After a while, Jack asks, without the scarcest suggestion of impatience or rush, "You with me, kid?"

Forced to go slow by the guiding hand on his chest and Jack's mutter of, "Careful, there," Mac sits up. Even when he's upright Jack doesn't let him go completely, his hand coming up away from Mac's chest to cup over his shoulder, right at the side of his neck. His palm is now pressed right over the scar Mac had grabbed for the moment he woke up, and Mac can feel his own pulse against Jack's thumb.

What follows mirrors that last day too, the bottle of pills Jack leaves on the coffee table when he finally leaves to get breakfast started. They're over the counter painkillers this time, rather than the prescription Mac had been sent home with after dislocating his shoulder, and there's an actual glass of water set next to them. Mac reaches for them absently, wincing when it stretches his re-injured shoulder, snagging the bottle and shaking a few out, tossing them back with a swig of water.

Wandering into the kitchen, Mac has a strong sense of deja vu. He's moving stiffly and slowly just like last time, though it's his ribs he's guarding with an arm, and even his shoulder is throbbing again despite the lack of a bulky brace to move around. Jack's standing at the stove just where Mac has found him after the disastrous exfil, though he isn't making hot cereal. There are a few bagels sliced on the counter next to the stove, and Mac can't figure out what he's going to do with them.

Instead of heading to sit at the table, he diverts towards the stove, peering at what he's doing to try and figure it out. Jack doesn't try to make him sit down, though he looks over with an appraising sweep of his eyes, up and down like he's trying to evaluate whether he should let this continue. Evidently, he's concluded that Mac isn't going to topple over at any moment, so he turns back to what he's doing. What Jack is doing is frying eggs, laying slices of cheese over the tops of them when they're sufficiently cooked, leaving the cheese to melt when he switches his focus to strips of bacon.

Fascinated, Mac watches him crosshatch bacon over half a bagel, putting what are turning into sandwiches together like puzzles. Bagel sandwiches, the meal he'd made the day after Bozer found out the truth, the hot cereal when Mac couldn't handle anything heavier.

"So, you're something of a cook then, huh?"

The laugh crinkles the corners of Jack's eyes and he shakes his head. "No, not really. Just breakfasts. When we were kids, as soon as we got old enough to be trusted with knives and stoves with some supervision, me and my sisters each got a meal that we'd help with during school breaks. Laurie had dinner and Debbie got lunch and mine was breakfast - I was the only one who could consistently get up early enough. Kinda picked up a bunch of stuff doing that, so it's my one skill, cooking wise. It's all my momma, in the end."

It stings a little to hear about Jack's family like this, when Mac can almost picture it. Some big cliched Texas farmhouse, the kind he imagines Jack grew up in, the woman in the picture on Jack's mantle guiding a spatula with her hand wrapped over the small one of a young boy. Two girls, one older than the boy and one younger, running down the stairs, a man from another room calling, "Don't you run on those stairs, Lauren, Deborah, you'll fall and break a hip." At the same time that it stings, though, Mac likes thinking about it. That bright, busy, happy house.

"Sorry," Jack says when the story stops, abruptly in the middle of detailing how one morning Debbie, the youngest of the three Dalton siblings, had tried to help him start before their mother got up. He must have noticed the odd expression on Mac's face, as his own has gone apologetic. Remorseful. "Didn't mean to rub it in."

"No, it's okay. I like hearing about your family." Shrugging, Mac looks down at the tiled kitchen floor. "They sound like good people."

"They are," Jack agrees, the smile back in an echo of itself, tugging up the side of his mouth. "We've got our moments, y'know, but they're good." Now the smile is back full force and Jack laughs shortly. His eyes shine fondly the way they always get when he tells stories about his sisters, the house just a little ways outside of Odessa. "They're gonna love you, y'know? My mom and the girls. Especially if you use your Mr. Fix It wizard skills on any of the half-dozen little projects Laurie and her husband keep promising our mother they're gonna get around to one of these days."

He's talking about it like it's a given, an easy assumption of unquestioned truth. Mac turns that over in his head for a minute, Jack talking like they already have some trip planned, like his mother and his sisters and their families already know who Mac is and are waiting for him out there in West Texas, with breakfast and projects and big, wide windows that let the sun stream through.

"Sorry," Jack says again, misinterpreting Mac's quiet. "Didn't mean to-"

"No." When Mac interrupts his voice is strong, sure. "It's okay. I'd like that."

Breakfast is good. The pills he'd swallowed down before coming into the kitchen take the edge off the bruising, which has deepened and bloomed overnight, leaving a gruesome watercolor painted over his torso which Mac gets a good look at when Jack insists on checking them over. Mac feels a little off in the aftermath of all of it, sitting at the table and sipping coffee. It's like there's an elephant in the room, now. An elephant that it takes him the duration of the short exam, breakfast, and the following cleanup to drum up the courage to turn to and address directly.

"So, what happens now?" he asks, hoping it sounds casual, rather than as nervous and unsteady as he feels saying it. "After last night, I… what now?"

Sitting across the table, Jack looks up from the sports section of the newspaper. The paper folds over on itself and Jack leaves it there, forgotten completely. "You mean now that I know about the abuse?"

It's blunt though not unkind, but Mac flinches anyway. He has a hard time hearing that word, so blatantly applied to his situation. _Abuse._ Jack doesn't qualify it or minimize it at all, just says it, direct and without any hesitation or reluctance. Despite the instant lance of guilt that spikes through him at the thought of calling what James does 'abuse' when there are so many people who have it so much worse than him, Mac nods his silent agreement to the question.

"I'd ask you not to tell Riley and Bozer," Mac says stiffly, haltingly, barely able to look Jack in the eye, "but…"

"But they already know."

Mac nods again.

"It's good you know that, at least," Jack tells him, his voice gone quieter, gentle without tipping over into the over-caution of how Mac had been afraid the man would start talking to him, like he was helpless or broken. There's no pity in Jack's words, just kindness. It sounds the way his hand had felt, pressing against Mac's chest when he woke up this morning. "If you ever want to talk to either of them about it, I know they would listen."

Thinking about it, Mac's face twists sharply. He can't imagine just… talking about it, broaching the conversation himself for no reason other than to have someone listen. Have someone hear him when he tries to give shape to the pain and how long it's been in him, where it came from, when it would all seem so stupid to say out loud.

"And neither of them would take it for anything less than what it is, if that's what you're worried about. None of us are gonna tell you that you're overreacting, or that it doesn't matter, or… Am I close?"

Though he can barely stand it, Mac nods for a third time. He feels his face getting hot, and he can't look at Jack at all any more, looking away instead. There are small spots of sunlight dappling the table, one of them glinting off a dime Jack found on the floor earlier, thoughtlessly tossed there.

Taking a deep breath, letting it blow out through near-shaking lips, Mac mutters, "Sorry."

"What is it you think you're apologizing for, then, huh?" The question is stronger than Jack's earlier ones had been, not quite angry but intense. Maybe even upset.

Waving a hand, Mac shrugs. "I don't know. Last night. All of it. For not being able to… I don't know. Feels like I should be able to handle it." He gets quieter and quieter until he gives up and drops his face down onto folded arms so his shamed expression isn't visible. Mac speaks into his own forearms, ignoring how the position strains his bruised ribs. "I'm twenty-four. I'm too old for this."

Though he can't see it, vision obscured completely by the fabric of his shirtsleeves, Mac hears Jack's low sigh and can picture his shoulders moving up and down, slow and tired. He hears the shift of the chairlegs too, when Jack moves his seat around the table, so he no longer sits across from Mac but beside him, close enough for Mac's sharp, focused hearing to pick up his breathing.

"Do you know how many people I've worked with, trained operatives with decades on the job, that I've seen break down after experiencing a major trauma?" It's not what Mac was expecting, though what he _had_ been expecting Jack to say he couldn't quite elaborate on. "And that's without twenty years backin' it up. That was the first time you ever talked about it, right? First time you ever told someone what's been happening to you?"

Fabric shifts under Mac's face when he dips his chin in agreement. "Bozer tried," he says. Mac tells himself the muffled, choked quality to the words are because of his face being obscured, rather than the thick feeling in his throat. "Couple of times, he tried, but I didn't… Wouldn't really let him."

When Bozer had tried, made those attempts to broach the topic of James, what he thought of the way Mac's father treated him, Mac had brushed him off. He'd told himself that Bozer didn't have the full picture, that he didn't know what Mac's job was like. That if he let himself open the Pandora's box of James that everything else would pour out with him, so Mac had shut down, shut away, went quiet.

"Right," agrees Jack, and though Mac doesn't make out any kind of judgement he looks up anyway, lifts his head to speak as clearly as possible.

"It wasn't his fault," Mac tells him, forceful and anxious. He can feel it welling in his chest, the worry that he's made it seem like something it wasn't, like Bozer didn't care or just dropped it, when the truth was so far from that. "He tried, but I wouldn't let him, he just-"

"I know. I don't blame him for that, Mac, I promise. It wasn't his fault you couldn't tell him, and it wasn't your fault either. I'm just… Really glad you told me. Real proud of you for that, too, I know it wasn't easy."

Like someone had jabbed fingers into the places where Murdoc had kicked him, Mac's chest throbs. He breathes shakily, looking back at the dime in the sunlight, and then Jack's hand is back. It's set on his forearm, gripping lightly, and Mac is glad. He's grateful, in this ripped open moment where he's already too embarrassed over all of this to feel even more so, for the way Jack touches him so often now.

Over the course of recent months, especially since Minnesota, Mac has noticed it, the way Jack touches him and how frequently it happens. How it's made him feel - acknowledged and important, like he's seen and accounted for. Like he matters. Jack gets his attention with a tap of Mac's shoulder, a nudge in his ribs, the flat of a palm against his back. He slings an arm around Mac's shoulders as they're walking down the street, rambling about nothing. It's like he always knows where Mac is. Jack is a very physical person, it didn't take long to figure this out about him, someone who knows and maps the shape of his world with his hands, holds the things that are important to him to commit them to memory, and somewhere along the line, that shifted to include Mac.

For the first time in… longer than he wants to try and qualify in case the answer is 'the first time in his life,' Mac is being touched like he matters, like he's a person not a tool or an enemy, outside of the house he shares with Bozer. For years, the person he is inside that house, vulnerable and young and aching with the need to be handled softly, has stayed there. Now the lines are blurring, every time Riley's hand takes his and their fingers lace tight together, or Jack lays a blanket over him when he's drifting in and out of sleep on the jet.

Or maybe they were never separated at all, and Mac was no more capable of leaving his heart behind at the front door than he would've been able to physically leave the organ itself there. Maybe that had been the problem all along.

"So, what happens now?" Mac eventually finds the strength to ask again. "This isn't going to happen the way it does in Lifetime movies, or whatever." Bozer had watched a few of those once, as 'research' for something or other. They'd always struck Mac as trite and oversimplified, too easy and too routine. Things don't resolve that way, not in real life. "You can't just lay down some kind of ultimatum with him and make him stop or else."

"Would you let me if I could?"

Mac thinks about it for a moment. It's such an odd question, like what he wants would matter at all, but that's pretty typical of Jack. He's always saying weird things like that. As for the question itself… Would he let Jack do that? Allow someone to step in and _force_ James to stop. No more yelling. No more belittling, degrading, insulting, _hurting._

"Yeah," he admits. Jack's hand, still on his arm, squeezes. "I would."

"Well, we're just gonna get as close as we can, then. We'll make sure at least that he's not alone with you whenever we can avoid it," Jack says like it's really that easy. Like he can just put himself between Mac and James and refuse to move and that will be it. "I'll talk to Matty, see if she can develop a sudden interest in running point on our missions, stuff like that. I'm not stupid, I know what'll happen if I try and confront him directly, and I'm not gonna get myself fired that easy, but whenever possible, we'll do what we can to protect you from him. We all will. We just need you to decide you're going to let us."

It feels so strange to Mac, talking about plans to 'protect' him from James, talking about what's happening like it's something real and substantial enough to worry about protecting him from. There had been a teacher once, who'd caught Mac alone after class and asked some very pointed questions. Nothing ever came of it - she dropped it after Mac was very clear that James had never struck him.

"Is it alright if I bring Matty and Riley in on the plan then? The sooner we get started the better."

Despite the immediate fear that knee-jerks through him at the thought, Mac forces it down. _They know,_ he tells himself. _They already know._ "Yeah, okay."

Getting home and seeing Bozer for the first time since admitting what Jack had asked him about his father shatters Mac's composure. He nearly collapses into his best friend's arms moments after catching sight of him, Bozer holding on just as tightly, neither of them quite able to get a full breath in. The bruises on Mac's torso screech out their displeasure but he doesn't care, ignoring them completely.

"I told him the truth," Mac gasps out before the question can be asked, digging his fingers into Bozer's jacket. "About dad. About what- About what he's like, what he-" He can't finish, but he doesn't have to.

"Good," Bozer says fiercely, seeming to have already figured out what Mac was trying to say. "That's good, Mac, that's _really_ good."

When Mac steps aside to compose himself and catch his breath, he notices out of the corner of his eye the moment Bozer hugs Jack too, as fierce as his barely audible 'thank you.'

Riley gets there not long after and Mac meets her out front alone. He hugs her too though not even a rushed half-admission makes it out this time, and after they let go of each other their hands stay entwined between them. They stand on Mac's front porch, looking at each other for a long, empty moment, and Mac can't find anything to say. He tries a few times, opening his mouth and taking a breath, but nothing comes out.

"I know," Riley says when he closes his mouth a second time, feeling like a suffocating fish on a dock, unable to ask for help or explain what he's doing there. But, much like with Bozer inside, the explanation wasn't necessary. Maybe Jack told her, or maybe she'd guessed. Mac would believe either option, though as she repeats it, "I _know,"_ he's more inclined to the latter.

While he hadn't been at all surprised by Riley's quick arrival, the fact that it doesn't take longer than an hour for Matty to make it to the house is far more unexpected. She doesn't hug Mac like Riley and Bozer had, but she stands in front of him where he sits on the couch and meets his eyes directly. There's something faintly angry about her demeanor, under the firm set of her jaw and the furrow of her brow, though Mac knows without question it's not aimed at him.

That's one thing he appreciates about her. When Matty is angry with _you?_ You'll know.

"Whatever I can do to keep you safe from him," she says intently, "I promise you I'm going to do it. I know you don't like our investigation. I know you don't think we're right about what we've found and what we're looking for. And that's okay. I get that. But I need you to understand that investigation or not, I am on your side, and I could never stand by and let someone I work with treat anyone like this, not one of my agents and especially not his son. So we're going to keep you safe."

Mac doesn't know how to respond to that, and Matty doesn't make him answer. She just reaches out to briefly clasp his wrist, and lets the conversation end there.

However, as it turns out, Matty isn't just there to talk about their plan going forward regarding James. It comes up after everyone has had a few minutes to find some kind of solid footing, Mac stepping out onto the back porch until he can look any of them in the eye without feeling like he's going to lose it all over again.

"I had a meeting this morning," Matty tells them. "With Oversight."

The instant he hears it, Mac's heart rockets into his throat. Jack and Riley ask questions as she explains, Bozer keeping silent while he digests what's going on. Matty throws in an aside specifically to him every so often, bringing Bozer up to speed on the investigation at the same time as she tells the group as a whole about the meeting that took it to the next major stage. He looks a little green, but he seems to be handling this latest revelation pretty well, as far as Mac can tell.

Much like Bozer, Mac doesn't ask questions while she talks. He listens, a faint buzzing underlying all of it, while Matty tells them that it hadn't gone over very well when she'd presented her suspicions to Oversight. The panel of three in charge of DXS don't seem to be taking her very seriously, and at least one of them had suggested she might be imagining things. But they hadn't shut Matty down either, nor indicated a plan to tell James about what she'd said, which was more optimistic at least than being dismissed outright. It will be, she tells them, an uphill battle to convince them that she's right, but they have a foot in the door now, and that means there's hope.

Hope. Mac snorts softly when he hears that, too quiet for any of the others to hear. Hope is not what this investigation feels like to him.

"There's something else, too," Matty says, and Mac feels like he's got a headache coming on.

"What else can there _be?"_ That's Bozer, finally speaking up, voice climbed about an octave in shocked incredulity. Mac doesn't blame him - it's a lot to take in.

"I heard about what happened on your mission yesterday," she says, directed towards Mac and Jack.

This prompts Bozer to interject again, asking, "Sorry, what 'happened' yesterday?"

Matty makes no move to immediately answer, neither does Jack. This leaves Mac to figure out how to answer it himself, his roommate's eyes turned on him in a look of growing worry and dismay. It's a tug of war to decide what to tell him, to find a middle ground between not lying and not scaring Bozer unnecessarily, when he's still so used to this. 'I was pistol whipped, thrown to the ground, had the shit kicked out of me, then got stomped on,' while technically the truth, is harsher than he needs to hear.

"I got… attacked, while sweeping a building," Mac says hesitantly. He hates the look on Bozer's face, the hurt he can see there, the narrow of his eyes as he's surely noting the bruises dotting Mac's jaw from where Murdoc has grabbed his face. "I'm okay," he's quick to add. "He didn't break anything and I didn't need any stitches, it's just bruising."

"Just…" Bozer starts, unable to finish through lack of air to do so. The word was breathless. Incredulous and wounded.

"The guy who did it, he knew things." Maybe Mac goes on so soon to get it out before he loses the nerve to talk about his terrifying encounter with the hit man, or maybe he does so before he has to hear whatever Bozer has to say about Mac characterizing what happened to him as 'just' anything. Either way, he's talking again before the sentence can be finished. "About me, about my dad, about our… Our relationship. He knew about you, too, Bozer, and he took responsibility for Bosnia. Sounds like he's been watching me for a while now."

"What I'm more concerned about right at this moment is what happened after your run in with, what did he call himself? Murdoc?" When Mac nods, Matty goes on. "Because I was never brought into the loop by James, and I checked. There's no sketch on file, and no debrief scheduled."

"He said it could wait," Jack says, the venom in his voice making it very clear how he feels about that call. "Mac asked right away which artist we were gonna use and when the debrief was gonna happen and the Director just blew him off, then took off as soon as we got home. So we've got no idea who this guy is, just some alias. We didn't get him on any cameras and now we don't even know if we're gonna get a sketch at all."

"I could do one."

Everyone, including Mac, turns to look at Bozer. He still looks a little sick, but there's something set in his face too. Determined and stubborn.

"Y'know, I've seen his drawings," Jack says to Matty, nodding slowly. "They're not half bad. They're really good, actually, that might not be a bad idea."

"Are you up for this?" Matty asks, and Bozer doesn't hesitate even for a second.

"I want to help. This is something I can do."

Riley goes through the folders Matty had brought on Bosnia and on the other moments Murdoc had mentioned during his and Mac's brief altercation, looking for any evidence at all of a connection between them. As she combs through the files for evidence that there had been another presence there, Mac and Bozer sit at the table, working on the sketch of their mystery man. He is indeed a very skilled artist, Mac has seen it time and time again over the years, but there's something disconcerting about seeing his talent used like this.

It's chilling to see Murdoc's face again. Even rendered in a two dimensional, pencil-on-paper sketch, Mac's skin crawls when he sees those eyes for a second time, remembers them staring at him through the gloom of that building in San Miguel. He looks at Bozer's drawing for a long time, then nods and calls Matty over.

"This is him. This is Murdoc."

Riley comes over too after a moment, abandoning her papers at the coffee table, and when she sees the sketch she stops dead in her tracks. She points at the paper and says, "Amsterdam."

"What?" Mac asks, looking up and over his shoulder at her, then back down to the sketch. "What about Amsterdam?"

"That's the guy I saw. Down on the street in Amsterdam, remember? When we were doing that stakeout and I had my _Rear Window_ moment. I'm sure it was him, that's who I saw watching us. He was watching us in the apartment and he was following us in the car."

Silence reigns while Mac, Matty, Jack, Riley, and Bozer all stare at the same piece of paper, the drawing of the man's face. Whatever is going on here, one thing is clear. Murdoc has been watching them for a lot longer than Bosnia, and Mac has the distinct feeling he's not done yet.

"Did he say anything else to you?" Matty asks, touching Mac's arm to get his attention. The flinch is small, but it's there, and she's gracious enough to pretend she doesn't notice. "Aside from taunting you with everything he knew about you, did he say anything that would indicate any kind of plan he had?"

"Not really," Mac tells her through a sigh. He rubs his hands down his face and shakes his head, unable to keep his eyes from creeping back to the sketch. "He was hired by someone, was supposed to kill me in Bosnia, but he didn't, and then I guess he thought I was too interesting to kill. Before he left, he told me…" His throat feels dry and he stops, swallowing. "He told me I lived because he decided to let me, and he wanted me to remember that."

"Jesus, Mac," Bozer says, hollow and shocked, and Jack swears quietly.

Before she takes her leave, Matty has a few instructions for them. She tells Riley first to continue going back over the files, looking for any hint of Murdoc and promising to bring another set over later. Every mission from a month or two before and everything after Amsterdam will need to be examined too. As for James, she tells them to let her worry about him.

"I'll do my best to figure out why he didn't have a sketch done right away," Matty says, tucking Bozer's drawing into the briefcase she'd brought with her. "And you two, Mac and Jack, you tell me right away if the Director does schedule a debrief or a meeting with an artist. In the meantime, I'll keep you all updated on how things go with Oversight. I have a follow-up scheduled with them next week, and this might help."

"They agreed to a follow-up? Do you think they're even going to listen?" As surprised as Jack sounds is about as surprised as Mac feels. He hadn't been expecting that.

"I pushed until they agreed. And I'm going to push until they listen, too." There's steel in Matty's eyes and her voice and Mac doesn't envy the Oversight board. He wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that look from her, that's for sure. "At the very least, this deserves a formal investigation opened. They're going to see that."

To the surprise of everyone, maybe himself most of all, Mac agrees, saying, "You're right. They do need to look into it. Something needs to happen to get to the bottom of this, whatever it is you guys found. If it's James" _It can't be him,_ "or whoever, maybe they can find it."

Maybe, if Mac's own suspicions were right, then Oversight will find Walsh before James can. And, maybe, if Walsh is found, things might get better. It's all he can hope for, now.

The next few weeks pass in a blur. It's an unsettling monotony of a milk-run mission and a pair of assists to other teams, against a background of tense waiting for Matty to update them on the progress of how things are going with Oversight - which, so far, is slowly. They're busy people and obviously the red flags Matty has raised about James aren't taking great priority.

Though Mac doesn't really know what Oversight does on a daily basis, he knows that the infiltration had to have thrown things off, especially with the sheer extent of how deeply James had cleaned house. Every one of the people he'd ousted must now be individually investigated to see whether they were truly involved or not, and if they were, how much they knew. Mac isn't surprised it's taking them this long, especially with a Deputy Director and most of the upper level technical analytics staff among that group.

Amidst all of it, the saving grace is Jack. He's decided to keep up the crusade he'd started with the roller skating rink, dragging Riley, Bozer, and Mac all over town in an attempt to 'teach you over-serious kids how to have some real fun for a change'. After the first trip to the rink, Jack makes them take turns choosing what to do, which is an admittedly helpful distraction from everything else going on.

Tonight is one of those Jack enforced 'you're going to have fun and you're going to like it' nights, the ones Mac and Riley have been groaning about but are enjoying far more than they'll admit to without great persuasion. First up in the rotation, Mac had chosen bowling, which everyone seemed surprised by. Then Bozer had brought them along to a production of a friend of his' drunk Shakespeare company. They were doing A Midsummer Night's Dream, and had even managed to collectively peer-pressure Matty into coming along.

(The troupe, the Boozy Bards, are doing the Tempest the following month and Matty's already agreed to join them for it again.)

Now it's Riley's turn, which sees her, Jack, Bozer, and Mac crowded together in the stands of an actual bout of the Los Angeles Derby Dolls roller derby league. Everybody's getting pretty into it, watching the competition, Mac included. He's not usually much of a sports person but it's amazing how being with somebody who's really into something can make you get excited for it too, and Riley's giddiness is contagious. She'd started talking on the way to the track and hasn't stopped since, at first answering their questions about what they were about to see, then telling anecdotes from her time playing.

It's good to hear her talking like this, fast and enthusiastic, one line of thought leading right into another. Riley is happy and fondly nostalgic, and Mac can feel some of the tension of the past weeks seeping out of him as he laughs along with Bozer at some story she's telling about a long-lasting grudge she'd developed with a skater on a rival team.

"Yeah, and then she was out for like, a couple weeks with an injury and you know what?"

"What?" Mac asks through a smile, playing his part in the story when she pauses, waiting for it.

"I actually missed her!" Riley sounds incredulous and a little affronted as she says it, her hands going up in the air as if to ask _can you believe that?_ Bozer and Jack laugh and Mac can't help but join them, shaking his head at her expression. "No, I'm serious! It's like there was something missing without her, I think we were closer to friends by the end of it than anything. It was weird. Man, I wonder what she's up to now…"

Mac returns from the concession stand near the end of the first half with a bag of chocolate-covered candies just in time to hear Bozer say, "Hey, Riley?"

"What's up?" Her eyes don't leave the track. Following her gaze, Mac sees that Riley is tracing the path of a trio of skaters who have formed a kind of triangle, one woman skating backwards, braced against two of her teammates facing her. They seem to be using the formation to block an opponent from getting around, and Mac is impressed. He remembers the unsteady, wobbling feeling of being on roller skates and doesn't think he'd last five seconds in a competition like this.

"So those names," Bozer says, pointing down at one of the skaters at the side of the track with her back to them. She's got a long, curly blond ponytail tossed over a shoulder and DOLLY SPARTAN screen-printed on the back of her uniform shirt in bright purple block letters.

"Derby names, yeah."

"So, you have one?"

There's been a time-out called, the action on the track at a stand-still while the refs speak to a skater, gesturing out towards another. With nothing much happening down there, and the possibility of finding out _this_ piece of backstory on their friend, everyone is focused on Riley. Mac can feel himself grinning as wide as Bozer is next to him, and Jack's eyes are glinting on Riley's other side. She shakes her head and snorts, looking up to the rafters.

"Oh come on," Bozer groans, leaning half over Mac's lap to give Riley a pleading look. "You've _got_ to tell us. Was it something good? I bet it was something good."

Holding out for just a few seconds longer, Riley quickly relents. "Fine, okay, my mom sent me a picture, actually, after I told her about the rink the other day. Hold on…"

The picture she pulls up and passes around is priceless. A younger Riley stands proudly with her hands propped on her hips, back to the camera and mugging over her shoulder with a mock-tough expression. Twin braids hang down from under a bright green helmet and she's wearing a uniform much like the woman down on the track. Plastered across her shirt, in the same green tone as the helmet, are loud, bold letters.

"Ruth Slayer Ginsberg?" Mac reads off, then looks up, raising an eyebrow at her. "As in- as in a pun on the United States Supreme Court Justice Ginsberg?"

"The very same."

Bozer is doubled over his knees now, slumped half against Mac's leg, and Mac is whacking him on the back to keep him from choking on his own laughter.

"It was either that or Mazel Tov Cocktail," Riley tells them, shrugging when Mac's other eyebrow joins the first. "What? I was the only Jewish girl on my team and I had a point to make, okay?" She's laughing too, and Bozer's wheezing and breathless.

Jack grasps Riley's shoulder with a mock-serious face, telling her, "I'm still so proud of you for that one. Think you should've gone with it, honestly."

Mac closes his eyes and lets the moment wash over him. His chest feels tight but for once not in a bad way, like his lungs could burst at any second from the fizzing, over-aired balloon sensation. If he could, Mac would bottle this feeling and save it forever, go back to being this light, this happy.

They're still talking on the way home, it being Jack's turn to tell anecdotes from what he remembers of Riley's derby days, back when she'd been on the junior team learning to skate with kids her age.

"And I was her other emergency contact, right-" For a brief moment at a red light, Jack's eyes flick from the road to the passenger's seat where Riley's sitting directly in front of Mac, addressing her directly. "And you still absolutely hated my guts at the time, Ri, so do you remember what you did when they called me after you took that fall and couldn't get ahold of your mom?"

"I kicked you in the shin," Riley says, a shade proudly. She doesn't sound upset at the memory, despite the conflict it speaks of in their early relationship. Instead she's smiling, shoulders jerking in a short, choppy laugh at the antics of her younger self.

"She kicked me in the shin! With her skate on and everything!"

It's an amusing mental image, but it makes something else jump into Mac's mind, something he thinks about for the rest of the drive home. He goes quiet and contemplative while the car around him is still alive with the sound of the other three talking. If they notice his slight change in demeanor they don't show it, except for briefly on the way up to the house, Riley's hand slipping into his for a quick squeeze and then letting go again.

It takes until he's standing on the back porch alone for anything to come of it. Jack walks out after he's been there for maybe two or three minutes, leaning on the railing and watching the skyline. He doesn't say what he's doing there, but Mac knows well enough Jack is there to check on him. So, finding his moment and grabbing onto it, he says it before he can change his mind.

"I want to change my emergency contact."

"What was that?" Jack asks, confused and curious. Mac can hear him walking closer but he doesn't turn and look. He doesn't want to lose his nerve.

"I said I-" About to repeat what he'd said, Mac cuts himself off instead. "Listen, when I was in the hospital after my run, the heatstroke, they only called my-" He chokes on it a little, clearing his throat and looking down at his hands on the railing. The knuckles are pale and bloodless and Mac relaxes deliberately, uncurling his fingers from the wood and resettling them lightly. "They only called him because his number was listed and they couldn't understand what I was saying."

"Yeah," Jack says quietly. He steps closer, their shoulders brushing now. Mac shivers. "I remember."

"Well, it's always just been him, I never thought to change it, but every time I end up- I think I should change my emergency contact. And I- I want it to-" Mac trails off too quiet even to hear his own voice at the end of the sentence, voice dying into silence.

"Gonna have to speak up a little there, buddy, I couldn't quite catch that."

"Iwantitotbeyou," Mac admits in a rush. He can't look next to him, cheeks burning, staring instead out over to the skyline.

"Yeah." When Jack agrees, his voice has gone quiet and a little odd. Mac glances over at him, nervous, and sees something on his face that's not dubious or pressured, whatever Mac had been worried he was going to see. No, his expression is soft and fond, smiling a little, enough to crinkle the edges of his eyes. "Yeah, okay. We'll do that, I'll go in with you tomorrow and we'll fill out whatever papers we need to."

"Okay." Feeling a little silly and weird for having made such a big deal about this, Mac's thoughts begin to race faster and faster, until they're stilled by an arm settling around his shoulders. He's tugged a little closer into Jack's side and goes easily, leaning a little, and then harder as the moments pass. "Thanks."

At first Jack doesn't say anything, and then Mac feels his chest against the back of his shoulder, giving a stuttering inhale, then asking, "What are you thanking me for?"

"For agreeing to… y'know." Just before he'd have shrugged, Mac catches himself, not wanting to accidentally hit Jack in the chin or something. It's another step Jack never had to take, another increased level of responsibility he wasn't obligated to. And he'd agreed so quickly, like he hadn't even had to think about it.

"If it were just up to me," Jack tells him lightly, "I'd have changed that designation myself months ago."

Mac can't think of what to say in response to that so he just shrinks slightly under Jack's arm, watching the lights. Jack doesn't move, doesn't pull away or turn to head back inside, and Mac gets the feeling he won't. Not until Mac decides to move first. And he knows he should, should straighten up and step away and go inside. Get himself together.

When he takes a deep breath, Jack's hand rubs his upper arm for a moment, a thoughtless, almost unconscious acknowledgement that he'd felt it, noticed the sigh. Maybe in a minute, Mac decides. Maybe for now, he'll just stay here with Jack, warm and safe, and watch the lights.


	41. Sooner or Later (Gonna Cut You Down)

_[sheepishly scratches back of neck] so remember how this was supposed to be up a week ago? sorry folks. this whole month has just... man. some stuff's come up personally, and then it was finals, and then i took the law school admittance test and. well. you didn't come here for me complaining, so! hopefully this is an indication my ability to write has returned to me._

_chapter warnings: brief scenes of poisoning/drugging_

* * *

Matty has a headache. Truthfully, Matty has more headaches than she can count, but this one, refreshingly, seems to be of the purely physical variety. She rummages around in the top drawer of her desk, looking for an extra-large bottle of Tylenol that her assistant, Andi, gave her for her birthday as a joke. A joke it may have been, but it has proved helpful more than once already. Her phone vibrates loudly against the surface of her desk and, in what Matty would like to wish was a coincidence, her headache spikes abruptly.

Despite her reluctance to turn it over, what Matty finds on the phone's screen is a relief - it's absolutely nothing to do with the Director. So much of her recent life has been focused on dealing with the Director that anything _not_ about him has come to be a welcome reprieve. Even, as she notes the contents of the message, if it means she's got to deal with an HR mix-up with their newest exfil agent's emergency contacts and medical file.

That had been a major focus of hers not too long ago, for reasons that were to do with the Director. Mac had caught her on the way out the door after a strategy meeting about the investigation, face screwed up in a determined frown that Matty will go to her grave swearing she doesn't find endearing. He'd told her, standing awkwardly by the front door of the house with one hand propped on the doorframe and a voice that failed at sounding nonchalant, that he'd decided to change his emergency contact designation, and needed her help to do it.

Frankly relieved, given some of the conversations she'd had with Jack after Mac's heatstroke hospitalization, Matty had agreed to help immediately. The first thing she'd done was contact the department head of medical. It hadn't been surprising to her at all that the woman was on board with helping her make such a change to policy regarding one of their top agents while keeping it under the radar of their boss. Matty has to imagine that, given the nature of her work, the chickens of James's carelessness have come to roost more than once in Dr. Emily Bell's department.

The way they'd worked it out, Dr. Bell would make the change in her personal master bank of files, and then trickle it down the chain to enough members of her department that there would always be at least one person on-shift who knew to keep James from being called in the event something happened with Mac. They're lucky, at this point, Matty thought and continues to think, that James is an unpleasant enough person that he doesn't tend to make friends _anywhere_ he goes. Within DXS medical, the overwhelming majority of the employees bear both a significantly active dislike of the man combined with a steadfast loyalty to Dr. Bell which means Matty isn't too concerned about anyone alerting James to the change.

It's one less thing to be worried about at least. Goodness knows she has enough of that going around, what with the investigation rapidly escalating. With every person Matty carefully selects and approaches, asking questions that are bound to raise serious red flags with anybody paying even a little bit of attention, it feels like another pebble on the scale. On their own they don't mean much, the stories and interviews, concerns raised and questions unable to be answered, but taken all together, those scales have started to tip.

The entire process of essentially stealing DXS out from under James is a massively long, frustrating undertaking where every step is a huge risk that could topple the whole house of cards at any moment. So, business as usual in the life of Matty Webber.

At the moment, Matty is having a pretty good day, all things considered. There are some things you learn to do when you've been in this line of work as long as Matty has, and one of those things is to take your mercies where you can get them, no matter how small. She might be fighting an uphill battle trying to get Oversight to take her seriously regarding their prized project's rogue director. She may have an Everest of paperwork and discrete interviews to get through. She's still facing the fact that one of her top agents and her best source regarding her investigation has been so deeply traumatized by the aforementioned rogue director that, putting personal feelings on the matter aside, getting information out of him about the man is like pulling teeth. All of this is true, and none of it is going away.

However, not everything is all bad news all the time. For one, James seems blessedly unconcerned about the sudden interest Matty has taken in being directly involved in Mac and Jack's field missions. She's been running ops for them since the beginning, but lately she's been joining them in the field as often as she can without prompting suspicion. It helps to be able to watch from the ground, to keep tabs on what happens and what doesn't, what goes wrong and when.

The mission they're on that day is one she's with them in the field for, on the ground in Caracas. Her role on these missions differs depending on the job, and it's afforded her an opportunity to observe more than just the impact of the missteps on them, but also how this team is operating as a whole. And it is, in a word, fantastic.

Despite the fact that her field training has been so far under the table it's essentially in a secret sub-basement, Riley is shaping up into a highly competent agent. Lately, Matty herself has been getting more involved in it. Before bringing Mac into the investigation, she hadn't had much of an active role in the girl's instruction, leaving that part to Jack. She had enough on her plate, she'd figured, without adding that. Then, after they'd read Mac in, and especially after Bozer found out, something changed. Matty can't quite pinpoint what that something is, but it's been both a blessing and a curse. It's brought her much closer to them, which is as comforting as it is dangerous.

At the moment, the delight of seeing Riley acting as a competent and promisingly skilled field agent is sweetened by the time Matty has personally put into bringing her to this point, and she allows herself the luxury of sitting back and basking in it. The two of them are in the van out on the street, from which Matty was supposed to be coordinating the op while Riley handled surveillance and any technical needs. In reality, it's more like Riley is running the op herself, clearly used to doing so. She aggregates information, assesses the situation, and relays it all out to her teammates with such efficiency it leaves little for Matty to actually do, all the while staying on top of the information scrolling across the monitors she commands.

And then there's Mac and Jack. Matty's got eyes on them from where she sits in the van with Riley, watching them head down the street and listening to their voices over the headset clipped over her ear. There's an ease in the way they move around each other that has grown and blossomed when Matty wasn't paying attention, only for it to be plain as daylight when she looked. Gone are the days when Mac and Jack had circled each other from a stiff distance, neither sure what was going to set the other off and how badly.

James had bemoaned it from the start, before Matty had gotten the green light to contact Jack and ask him on board with DXS, how difficult it was to find a suitable partner for his son. He'd complained at length, voice sharp with exasperated derision, about how the agents assigned to work with Mac all ended up not being able to either keep up or tolerate working with him, which resulted in every one either being fired or quitting. Even then, Matty had privately been of the opinion that the common denominator in those failed partnerships wasn't Mac so much as it was James. She'd crossed her fingers, hoped she was right, and called Jack.

It hadn't been easy, at first. Jack had been frustrated and suspicious, unable to make heads or tails of Mac, who was so unlike anyone he'd ever been partnered with before. Mac had been suspicious too, though in a different way, brilliant but full of cracks with jagged edges, no more idea what to do with a person like Jack than Jack knew what to do with him. And now… Now amiable chatter filters through her headset, Jack making fun of some aspect of Mac's Spanish pronunciation. Mac shoots back that he knows they're supposed to be blending in, but did Jack really have to pick a pair of sunglasses that made him look like the clueless sunburnt dad in every disaster movie?

"Hey now, these are my regular sunglasses, what are you trying to imply?"

Mac's just laughing, it being obvious he knows this already, which seems to have been the main point in bringing it up. Next to Matty in the van, Riley is laughing too, rolling her eyes and chuckling as she clicks through from one camera angle to another. Matty can't help the slight smirk that forms on her own face, shaking her head at the indignant tone of Jack's voice.

Things go well until there comes a point at which Mac and Jack need to split up to head into and search a pair of adjacent buildings. They're standing at the sidewalk about to part somewhat down the street, but still close enough that from her vantage point Matty can see their movements and body language. If it weren't for the fact that Mac could hear her too, she'd have made a joke about how well Jack is managing to hold down the 'parent at the first morning of kindergarten drop-off' energy he's radiating so loudly she can sense it even from her distance.

Not that she can really blame him for the unease. Matty knows from hearing reports and from direct involvement that they haven't split up like this since the mission Mac came home from wearing fingermark bruises inked deep into his jaw and a boot print over the side of his ribcage. Jack has to be thinking about that now, and it becomes clear Mac is too, because he's the one who ultimately hesitates.

The moment Jack turns away, Matty sees it. It's the same off-beat second that Mac turns abruptly back towards his partner, hand shooting out just a fraction like he'd been about to grab onto Jack's arm, stop him from leaving. Even from here, Matty can see his posture change, recoil in on itself and snap to rigidity. Jack doesn't see any of it, still facing away towards his allotted building, and Mac doesn't say anything, outreaching hand now held tightly close to his own torso, arms folded. Without thinking about it, Matty speaks up.

"Mac, if you need a minute, you can go ahead and take one," she tells him. Riley's eyes are on her immediately, she can feel them boring into the side of her head, but Matty doesn't stop or slow down. "We're on the clock but not _that_ on the clock."

There's a small, sharp jerk of Mac's shoulders when she says it, directly calling out the movement she'd seen, though he'd likely hoped no one had noticed. But once Matty did notice, she couldn't, in good conscience, pretend she hadn't. Not when there's something to be done about it. So she steels her nerve, tries not to think about the flinch, and keeps going.

"I know the technician monitoring communications on this op," she tells him, sure she knows at least one thing he's worried about. There's a transcript generated for each mission, a log of what was said via DXS issue communications technology, for accountability, intel, and debriefing purposes. Matty agrees with them in principle, but it's impossible to think that they haven't been used as a tool in the past, something for James to pull out in one of the reviews Jack had told her about. "I picked him myself. The transcript that goes into the file will contain only what I decide it will. On missions that I run with you, we speak freely."

The information seems to help Mac relax a fraction, but he otherwise doesn't respond. Jack, however, having turned around and paid attention when Matty started talking, does. His voice is hushed and direct, obviously meant for Mac only, but thanks to their comms units he's still audible. Matty and Riley do what is generally accepted to be polite in this situation and pretend like they can't hear anything at all, though there would be no way to avoid overhearing everything that's said unless they actually turned their frequencies off entirely, and that just isn't safe.

"If you aren't comfortable splitting up," Jack says while Riley focuses intently on the stream of code she'd already used to access one of the buildings' wireless security system, Matty squinting along at it as if the string of information is anything she can make heads or tails of, "then we don't have to."

"It's fine." Mac's voice is stiff and a little embarrassed.

It's one of the few moments Matty can remember clearly regretting that their technology has been refined and upgraded enough that she can hear the nuances of emotion in his voice. She can hear the same in Jack's when he answers.

"It's pretty clearly not fine, and the last thing I want you to do is lie to me and tell me that it is because you think that's what somebody here wants to hear."

There's a soft clicking sound as Riley picks at the corner of the spacebar on her keyboard with a thumbnail. There's a small, tired frown on her face that speaks of a quiet heartbreak, the kind that burns like a low-grade fever. It's the kind of heartbreak that you accumulate by teaspoons over the span of weeks and months, the kind born of watching someone you love live in constant pain. Matty's been feeling it herself, more and more lately, though she knows it's worse on Riley.

Riley has been so close to Mac, right from the start, when the two of them clicked like pieces of a long-lost puzzle. It doesn't make it any easier on her, Matty would guess, that she knows something of what Mac is experiencing, thanks to her own history. Theirs is a close relationship of love and understanding, and Matty can see it written all over Riley's face, how hard it is for her to hear Mac now, denying that the psychological wounds left on him by Murdoc's attack could possibly matter now that the physical injuries have faded.

The damage done by people like James spreads and warps out from its target and into everyone who loves them. It's like an earthquake whose aftershocks ripple out and out, the measure of the end-result incalculable in its reach. But Matty believes, and clings to the hope that she's right about, that the things they're doing to combat that damage will have just as far reaching an impact. Things like this, Jack taking the time to make sure he's actually going to be okay with splitting up, Matty herself repeatedly asserting in no uncertain terms that Mac's involvement in this investigation is strictly by his own will and at no point will he be forced into anything… It has to mean something.

It takes Jack a minute of talking Mac around to get an answer from him that seems acceptably honest, and they do indeed end up splitting up. Matty looks up away from Riley's monitor just as they separate, catching the moment Jack reaches out to clasp the side of Mac's neck, giving him a small, affectionate shake. As Mac heads into his building, Jack looks over at the van and flashes a thumbs up. Riley seems to feel a little better at this, shaking her head and saying into her headset, "Don't do anything stupid."

"We won't," comes Mac's reply.

"Oh, it definitely wasn't you I was talking to," Riley blithely tells him, face breaking into a grin when Jack responds with the mock-offense Matty is sure she'd been trying to elicit. It does its job, and the tension is broken, if not gone completely.

Aside from the brief hiccup when Mac and Jack went to split up, things go as smoothly as they ever go, and the mission wraps up early without any major issues. Nobody is hurt, nobody goes missing, and Matty gets to experience the very particular satisfaction that comes from sitting at the helm of a very well oiled, fine tuned machine as it does exactly what it's supposed to do, exactly as it's supposed to do it. It's amazing what can be accomplished when James and his ulterior motives are if not out of the picture then at least moved somewhere off frame.

Maybe it's the runner's high of a job well done. Maybe it's something about the memory of drunk Shakespeare and the stubborn set of Jack's jaw as he'd explained to her that he's going to teach these kids - an emphatic gesture over towards Mac, Riley, and Bozer - that it's okay to have fun sometimes if it kills him. Regardless, whatever the reason she thinks of it, in the end, the bar is her idea.

There's a little bit of time left before their exfil is scheduled to arrive, and rather than spend it sitting around twiddling thumbs and waiting for exfil Sierra November to whisk them away back to California, Matty has another suggestion. The bar they end up in to wind down somewhat, enjoy the end of what had been a genuinely beautiful day that they'd had no time to actually appreciate yet, is just beginning to get busy. The table they've parked themselves at is tucked away into a corner with a good vantage point of the rest of the spacious room, including the bar itself.

An order has been placed, and while they wait for their drinks, Matty mostly sits back and listens, as she has done for the duration of their time in Venezuela. She watches Jack fold a piece of paper from his pocket into a slightly misshapen triangle, proceeding to attempt to teach Riley and Mac to play paper football on the table top. _Attempt_ is the operative word, as Mac gets almost immediately sidetracked by the idea that the paper football itself is weighted badly because of the way Jack folded it, seizing the object and taking it upon himself to improve the design.

"See," Mac explains, twisting open a paperclip that had come from the same pocket the paper had, obtained by holding a hand out and making grabby motions at Jack until he passed it over, "if I tuck this in here, then it will counterbalance the weight of where you doubled up on this side, and it'll fly straight."

While Riley appears to be paying close attention, Jack catches Matty's gaze over the tabletop, giving her an exaggerated eye roll. Despite the exasperated gesture, there's a fond smile on his face, deeply etched crow's feet erasing any hint of actual frustration he could've been mistaken for feeling. Matty laughs in a shallow, quiet huff of breath, unable to help smiling back at him.

Their table number is called over the moderate din, signaling that their order is ready. Waving a hand to dismiss anyone else's attempt to stand up, Matty heads to the bar herself to pick up the drinks. Especially this soon after the conclusion of a mission, even one that went as painlessly as this one had, it's impossible to turn off her instincts, and so on the way she keeps half her attention on the crowd around her. She knows where every exit is, about how long it would take to get there, what obstacles may present themselves. Matty's Spanish is more than adequate, and she's so dialed into listening to snatches of conversation in the language that when she hears what sounds like English, she almost misses it.

It's not exactly the most common occurrence in Caracas, and she frowns, looking around for the source. For a moment she thought it might have been one of the bartenders, but the man has stepped out of view by the time Matty thinks to really look at him. He pats a colleague on the back as he passes her, and then the woman is standing in front of Matty, telling her apologetically that there was a mix-up with one of their drinks, and it won't be out for another minute or so.

Dismissing her apology with a smile and a wave, Matty steps up on the rungs of one of the bar stools to sit there and wait, not particularly bothered by the delay. The tray already has three drinks on it, and a quick tally shows that it's hers they're still waiting on. Riley and Jack's drinks look relatively normal, brown liquid over ice, but the one she's identified as Mac's is a different story. For starters, it's purple, and there's what looks to be a candied orange peel, twisted into a decorative curl and held in place with a toothpick.

Seeing as Mac had already offered to let her try it when he'd seen the face Matty made hearing him order it, she shrugs and snags a straw out of a cup full of them set on the counter. Whatever she'd been expecting the drink to taste like… Well, there's no way to finish that sentence, because Matty genuinely had no idea what to expect. It's sweetly sugared with a tart bite to the aftertaste, some kind of imitation berry flavor mixed with what she thinks is triple sec and vodka. Pulling a face, Matty considers it for a long moment. Ultimately, it's not the best cocktail she's ever tried, but it's not exactly bad either.

Discarding the straw on a napkin, Matty looks around. The bartender she thought may have been speaking English hasn't reappeared, and the man at the other end of the counter is taller and heavier set than the one who'd been there before. Shift change, then, she supposes, trying to put it out of her mind.

Over the next few minutes, which seem to drag on longer than they should, the bar gets noticeably busier. The chatter of the patrons around Matty swells, the music playing over the sound system amplifies, even the faint rumble of motorcycle engines on the street outside seems to get louder. It's enough to make her start feeling like maybe this whole endeavor was a mistake, the noise kicking a headache to life, beginning to pound at Matty's temples. A string of lights spark and flare at the edge of her vision and she looks over sharply.

When the movement sends a wave of vertigo surging through her body, Matty knows. This isn't about the noise, or the lights, or even a post-mission comedown. Something is wrong. Something is very, _very_ wrong.

It's some miracle of determination that, when she stumbles down from the stool and scans disoriented eyes around the bar to locate her team, Matty has the wherewithal to grab the glass containing what was supposed to be Mac's drink. With single-minded focus, she moves through the modest but growing crowd, reaching the corner table with a slight trip.

"We have to leave," she forces through numbing lips, doing her best to make sure the words come out crisp and comprehensible. The conversation at the table is cut dead immediately, Matty's tone intense enough to snap Mac, Jack, and Riley to attention.

Luckily, they seem to put together what's happened fairly quickly. Jack leaves to pull the car around and Riley sweeps the glass out of Matty's hand before she can forget it's there and drop it. When they reach the car, Jack is already on the phone with exfil. Riley's laptop comes out quickly, her voice joining in over the top of Jack's. Matty's focus slips and loses track once there's multiple people speaking, but not so much so that she doesn't notice how Mac doesn't speak at all.

Shortly before his and Mac's partnership came to a slow and anticlimactic end, Seth Haken was shot in the field. Mac hadn't even seen it happen, and the shot itself was lost in the general chaos of the moment. He'd been two rooms over, trying to connect a radio to a power source, and what he had heard was the yell. A sharp, surprised, wounded howl he'd somehow known immediately was Haken. And while they were never close, weren't what Mac thinks could be called friends, that had been far from his worst partnership, and there are still moments when the guttural, involuntary sound of Haken's pain jolts through him like a Wilhelm scream on a soundtrack he can't turn off.

It happens again now. Standing in the doorway of a room in a vacant house Riley had located for them using a real estate website, Mac watches Jack speaking intently to Matty, who keeps swaying like she's about to topple over, and hears the sound of Seth Haken being shot ringing in his ears. He's hung back from where his team is focused on Riley, cell phone clutched in one hand and the glass from the bar in the other, an inch or two of purple liquid still in the bottom. Sierra November is en route, set to be there shortly, and Mac has been given the task of hanging onto Jack's phone and waiting for Lucia Sosa to call them back.

Lucia does call, indicating they're only another few minutes out and asking Mac to relay as much information as possible about what they're dealing with. He reports symptoms called to him from Jack and Riley and also from Matty herself, which is reassuring given it means she's still talking, though her breathing is labored and her words slow. Playing operator gives Mac something to focus on, which is good. It drowns out the looping playlist of panic in his brain, racing thoughts interspersed with the echo of Haken screaming.

When exfil shows up, Mac is able to slip out of the room entirely without being noticed. The door hangs half-open behind him, Lucia's voice firm and authoritative though he can't quite make out what she's saying, Sierra's team lead and most highly trained medic taking over swiftly and efficiently. Alone in the hall, Mac stops maybe ten feet from the door, back pressed to the wall and lungs suddenly tight. His chest heaves as he tries to get a clear, deep breath in, unsteady fingers tugging at the collar of his shirt until he's able to undo the top button.

Hunching over and bracing his elbows on his knees, Mac tries to calm down and focus. It's not remotely clear what the hell just happened, only that it hadn't been meant to happen to Matty. That drink, the one in the glass he'd shakily handed over to Sierra's rookie, Thomas King, before bolting, had been his. Whatever was in it, whatever drug or poison Matty had ingested thankfully little of, it had been meant for him. Maybe someone had tried to kill him or tried to take him or just tried to show him they could _hurt_ him, that there was nowhere he couldn't be reached, but whatever it was and whoever was responsible, they got to Matty instead.

The job was over. The mission had _ended_, there was no practical possibility that it was related to that. Not when there are far more compelling possibilities. Murdoc's voice hisses in Mac's ear and he flinches hard, ducking his head against his shoulder, scrubbing his ear against the fabric of his shirt like he could somehow get the voice to stop that way. Murdoc stalking him, the sickness his team thinks they've found inside DXS, Walsh.

Walsh.

There's no proof this is connected to him, to any of them, not even an indication when they don't have the first idea what's really just happened, but Mac can't rely on that to justify keeping quiet. If there's even the faintest chance, he has to tell them about Walsh. They know about Murdoc and obviously the investigation as well but that still leaves one piece missing from the puzzle, one potential boogeyman they don't even know to check the closet for. So Mac has to tell them. There's no way he could live with it if he kept it to himself any longer.

Not right away. Mac will wait until they get home, until Matty is okay and they've all had a minute to breathe. The inevitability of it settles over his shoulders, a weighted yoke of certainty. He's going to disobey orders. Not just orders but _the_ order, the most deeply trusted piece of his father's confidence, the mission he's been entrusted with assisting under strictest secrecy. If James finds out that he's told them, he'll be more than furious. But Mac can't just not tell them.

What it comes down to is this: it's not just him any more. The consequences aren't just Mac's alone to bear any longer, it's not just his nightmares, his close calls, his bruises and blood and ever-rising tally of stitches. It's Matty. Matty, who came with them to drunk Shakespeare and laughed so hard she couldn't speak, Matty who uses emojis when she texts, Matty who keeps throwing the brakes on things so she can check on Mac, make sure that he knows he has _choices_, that she's listening and making space for them.

It's incredible, really, how once Mac decides to light TNT at the core of his life he feels his breath come so much easier.

When Mac gets home, it's so late that Bozer is already asleep. He doesn't make any stops, heading directly to his room and collapsing into bed. Fortunately, sleep comes quickly and Mac doesn't dream that night, at least not that he remembers. When he wakes the next day, it's to a warm quiet and the familiar smell of home. After long moments spent laying there in the ever-lightening morning, steeling himself for the day ahead, Mac gets up, wandering out into the house.

Everything seems… normal. There are a few dishes in the sink, a light got left on over the stove, and there's several pages of printed text on the coffee table. On the otherwise empty kitchen island sits what looks like a voice recorder, probably something Bozer was using for some project or other. Outside, the faint sound of a car passing on the street rumbles by, and wind chimes sing softly on the porch. It's somewhat successful at combating the ball of nerves Mac can feel himself tensing up into. There's nothing quite like the feeling of being truly _home_ to help you try to believe things might actually turn out okay.

Needing something specific to focus on when a wave of nauseating anxiousness fights past the soothing feelings of _normal_ and _safe_, Mac walks over to the kitchen island, hopping up onto a stool and squinting at the recorder he'd spotted. On closer inspection, it doesn't look like any of the equipment he's seen Bozer use before. Probably something he's borrowed from one of his friends - it wouldn't be the first time.

Mac has just picked the device up, turning it over in his hands, when footfalls sound from the hallway, and Bozer wanders in. His steps are slow with the haze of just having woken up, his hand is warm and sleep-clumsy when it ruffles through Mac's hair in a wordless _hello_, and when he speaks, Bozer's question is cracked halfway through by a wide yawn.

"Wha-a- What's that?"

Mac feels in an instant that the room has chilled by degrees. He swallows hard, lifting the recorder more clearly into the air between them, hoping Bozer is just not quite all the way awake and thus not focusing very well. "This isn't yours?"

"No," Bozer tells him like it's no big deal. "I've never seen it before, sure it's not some of your weird spy shit?"

"No," Mac says. His heart beats loudly in his ears, and he can feel even Bozer's calm relaxation slipping away as they both look at the unfamiliar piece of technology.

Hesitantly, feeling almost like it's someone else's body he's moving, Mac slides his thumb over and hits the triangle-labeled play button. It gives a muted click, there's a split second of nothing, and then-

Static fuzzes sharply through the air. Mac and Bozer both startle at the sound. What follows is familiar, unsettlingly familiar. It's music. There's a single guitar riff and the sound of stomping and clapping laid behind it, then a deep, graveled voice starts to sing, the distinct and unmistakable sound of Johnny Cash.

_"You can run on for a long time, run on for a long time, run on for a long time, sooner or later God'll cut you down. Sooner or later, God'll cut you down."_


	42. Wrecking Ball In Reverse

_This chapter was a beast to write, but here it is now, and I hope you enjoy it! Feels like I've finally got my mojo back and I am so relieved._

_I really gotta say - I am so excited for what's coming next._

_(chapter title from sleeping at last's 'goes on and on'.)_

* * *

It's a nice day. Even compared to the standard for Los Angeles, it's a nice day. The sun, rising with the lengthening morning, shines unimpeded by the faint dusting of clouds that are scudding across the sky, shepherded along by a steady breeze. Riley has the windows of her car rolled down as she navigates the residential area surrounding Mac's street. She'd opened them as soon as she'd left the freeway, hoping the cross-wind would create some kind of placebo effect on her mind, sweep away at least some of the cloying haze of agitation clinging to her.

It doesn't really work. There's a lot to be worried about, all of it too heavy to be carried out on a steady rush of fresh air. On Riley's phone, tossed in her bag in the passenger's seat, is the cryptic message from Mac that had summoned her to his house this morning, claiming that there was 'something important' he needed to discuss with all of them. That alone would have been enough to set her nerves on edge and twist a faint nausea in her gut.

Even so, it isn't just that alone. Despite the odd text and the fact that she hasn't the faintest idea what he meant by it, Riley's mind is more occupied with something else, something that's been weighing hard on her since yesterday. What she's most concerned with, the topic that won't leave her thoughts for longer than a moment, causing the tension in her jaw and the occasional skip in her heart, is Matty.

When Riley had last seen the woman the night before, she'd been looking much better. Under the watchful eye of exfil Sierra November team lead Lucia Sosa, Matty had seemed to recover fairly quickly. Lucia ran some kind of test out of a kit that Riley didn't know the purpose of - and wasn't about to ask, with everything else going on around her - and the results in combination with Matty's assessed symptoms had led to a quick diagnosis of what she'd been dosed with. From there, Lucia had given her something and followed it up with a _lot_ of bottled water and a recommended check-in with Medical.

The suggestion of Medical had caused brand new concerns for Riley - she couldn't be totally sure, but she'd have been pretty confident in guessing by this point that keeping Director MacGyver out of the loop on this sort of thing was pretty high on everyone's priorities lists. Somehow, it just didn't seem like a good idea at all for him to know about what happened to Matty on that mission. What almost happened to Mac. Better for everyone if he was kept out of it.

The problem was if the Deputy Director were brought into Medical after this sort of event… There would be no keeping that quiet. It's not like Mac's emergency contact paperwork, which had been easy enough to sweep under the rug given the combination of the Director's general disregard for most daily goings-on at DXS and the man's less than stellar reputation amongst that department in particular. A mission follow-up visit for the Deputy Director herself? No way would the Director miss that.

Riley had chewed on her reservations regarding that plan until she could no longer stand it. Just when she'd been about to interrupt the quiet, serious conversation between Lucia and a significantly recovered Matty, she'd caught part of it that stopped her in her tracks. Lucia mentioned offhandedly, as if it were simply a given, that she would send the on-call doctor from Medical to Matty's office to be ready for her when she got there. She added that the on-call today was, according to what she'd looked up on the tablet in her hands, the kind carried by all DXS exfil teams to reference necessary information on the fly, Dr. Adrien Fitzpatrick, and they could be trusted to keep things on the down-low.

When she'd mentioned this, none of her exfil teammates had so much as batted an eyelid. They seemed to completely take Lucia's plan in stride without question of who they might want to be keeping things 'on the down-low' from. Not once did anyone specifically request that Sierra keep this incident from the Director's attention, and the fact that Matty didn't bring it up even when she was fully lucid again led Riley to believe that these people are already on their side.

It was a relief to be able to witness that in action. For all that Riley knew, practically speaking, that they had people in their corner, a growing faction within DXS ready to support Matty's leadership once she manages to get the Director removed, it's been a purely academic concept. Until that exfil trip home. Seeing it in person was different. Good different. The kind of different that makes Riley think that not only can they gut this place from the inside out, but that there will be something left over afterwards that they can build with.

That had been what she tried to hold onto, when she got home last night, and when she got up this morning. It had helped, but it hadn't worked completely, and the closer Riley gets now to Mac's house and whatever new calamity might be waiting for her there, it helps less and less. Relief and determination melted away from where it had been taking the edge off her fear until all that was left was the fear.

Riley parks with the distracted, autopilot movements of someone who has done it a thousand times before and has far more important things on their mind. And what's on her mind is Matty, still, Matty who is - judging by the car parked in front of Riley's on the street - waiting for her down in that house with Mac, and Bozer, and Jack. Riley knows she needs to go down there, go inside that house and confront whatever is in there, whatever condition Mac and Matty will each be in, but for a long moment she sits frozen, hand still on the gear shift, light dappling through the leaves above her and across the steering wheel.

Even though Matty had rapidly been on the mend the last Riley had seen here, there's still something about having witnessed her in that condition at all that's Left Riley unnerved and disquieted and almost afraid of seeing her again. The woman had been so… unsteady, and that's a word Riley had never thought was possible to apply to Matty of all people. She'd always seemed, in a word, untouchable. Even Mac didn't seem like that, with his plans that always worked in ways Riley couldn't understand and didn't think should be possible.

More times than Riley cares to reflect on, Mac has come home to California with bruises and stitches, blood dotting the collar of his shirt or flecked in the hair behind his ear. Mac is a lot of things, sometimes seems like something beyond human, but he isn't untouchable. Neither is Jack, though Riley had often tried to tell herself he was. She knows he isn't stone. She's seen him bleed. But Matty…

If they can get to Matty, what hope do any of the rest of them have?

The thought catches sharp in Riley's chest and she can't stand the feeling a moment longer, so she flings the car door open and steps out. She stands beside her car, the light wind lifting strands of hair and tickling the back of her neck, and takes in a deep breath. Closing her eyes, Riley releases the breath slowly, then turns toward the house.

Just as she'd thought from the cars parked outside, Riley is the last to join them. Bozer answers the door before she'd had the chance to knock, clearly having been watching out the window when she'd pulled up. He smiles, but it's unnatural and it doesn't reach his eyes. Mac, Jack, and Matty are waiting for them in the living room.

Matty looks like herself again. Granted, a version of herself who maybe didn't get any sleep last night, but she looks like _herself,_ and it eases some of the tension in Riley's shoulders. Unfortunately, the relief doesn't last very long. Not when she moves from looking at Matty, serious but determined, to looking at Mac. Mac doesn't look much like himself at all.

There's a recorder in Mac's hands, jittering in the air as the knee his elbow is propped on bounces rapidly up and down. He's staring at it, not looking at anybody else in the room, barely acknowledging when Riley sits down at the end of the couch.

"He found it on the counter this morning," Bozer explains. He doesn't sit, he stands at the side of the couch next to Mac, arms folded tightly across his chest and mouth creased into a freaked out frown. "It was just sitting there, when we got up. I didn't see it last night when I went to bed, so sometime during the night someone must have…" Though he doesn't finish the sentence, nobody prompts him to. They don't need him to. It's clear what must have happened.

Still without contributing a word to the conversation, Mac holds the recorder up in the air, more delicately and with more trepidation than when he handles bombs - Riley would know, she's seen him do it - and he presses 'play'. The song fills the air, chilling it sharply, until Mac hits another button, stopping it and letting a thick, pressing silence take its place.

"He really had to go and bring my man Cash into this?" It's Jack that breaks it, with a joking question that falls flat and elicits not even a slight chuckle from anybody else in the room. He doesn't keep trying, which is how Riley knows he's really rattled.

"Is there anything else on the recording?" Matty asks, and Mac shakes his head.

"We played it all the way through," Bozer tells her. He's looking at the device in his roommate's hand like it's alive and threatening. Like it might explode and kill them all. "There's no talking, no weird feedback, nothing else. Just that song. It was paused right before the one part when we found it, the. You know, the- 'you can run on for a long time', that bit. Kinda felt like the whole message was basically right there, y'know."

"Hell of a message," Jack says. He's sitting on the coffee table across from Riley and Mac, Matty in an armchair to the side, all of them looking at the recorder or, holding it, Mac. "Pretty clear though, I'll give him that."

"Him?" Riley can't help but cut in. "So we're thinking this is probably-"

"Murdoc, yes. After what he said to Mac when their paths crossed in San Miguel, it's obvious he's got something of an obsession. It's possible it's someone else, obviously, I'm sure you've got no shortage of enemies given your work at DXS-" Matty looks at Mac as she says it, and he confirms with one short nod, "-but given the note that was left with the student who was killed in Sarajevo, it seems like his style."

There's a short, meandering conversation that follows, discussion of Murdoc and the work Matty has been doing to track down as much information as possible on the internationally wanted hit man they've figured him out to be. It's agreed that despite the appearance that there isn't anything further on the recording, Riley is going to work with one of the techs from analytics to be sure there's nothing odd in there they simply can't hear. As involved as she is in the discussion of what is undeniably a threat, left presumably by a man from whom a threat is a very dangerous thing indeed, Riley can't help but be somewhat distracted too. Because the person the threat was obviously aimed for hasn't been participating at all. He's just sitting there, leg bouncing rapidly, staring off at nothing with his jaw set in a hard line.

All in all, Riley is pretty satisfied with the plan of attack they come up with. She's feeling far better than she had been on the drive over, better than she's felt since things went so badly south the day before. It doesn't last.

"That's not it," Mac says suddenly. It's the first thing he's said since Riley arrived at the house, and it stops the room dead in its tracks. "Or that's not the _only_ it. It's not really the main reason why I needed you guys here."

After the initial shock wears off, Riley has to admit she probably should have seen that coming. This is the sort of thing he probably could have told them about over the phone, and as upsetting as the recording would be to find left in your house overnight by some unhinged contract killer, it doesn't explain Mac's behavior. He's not acting like somebody dealing with a nightmare. He's acting like somebody walking death row.

Looking around the room shows Riley that nobody else seems to have any more of an idea what's about to come out of Mac's mouth than she does. Even Bozer seems mystified. It makes Riley anxious, every pinging nerve that had finally calmed down amping right back up again, worse than before.

"There's something I haven't told you guys." Mac's voice sounds odd. It sounds stiff and empty but strained, like he's forcing everything he can out of it. Scraping it clean and gutting it until all that's left are the words and none of whatever is that's behind them, crowded up in his chest and caught in his throat. It's not quite working, though, pieces of it escaping around the seams, leaking out into the unsteady words. "Something important. Something you're gonna think I should have told you a long time ago, something you might hate me for not telling you until now, and you'd- you'd be right to. But I need to tell you now so please just let me get through telling you before anyone starts yelling."

A pin dropping in that room would have been deafening. Mac won't look at His leg has stopped bouncing, knee going still from where it had been jittering erratically before. Sitting in his lap, Mac's hands are twisted together so tight they shake slightly and his elbows are tucked close to his sides, making him seem small. The thumb of his right hand scrubs over his left knuckles repeatedly, pressing down hard. Riley's heart skips in her chest, her own hands balling into fists, nails biting into her palms. Bozer looks like he's about to pass out, and Jack's face is creased in a frown so deep it makes her face hurt to look at it. The only one who looks like she's remotely handling this well is Matty, whose expression is completely impassive, blankly professional.

And so Mac tells them about Jonah Walsh.

Soared straight past scared, Mac sits there, terrified, and tells them the whole story, from the beginning up to yesterday, everything he knows. His voice and his hands shake as he talks about his father's partner, his father's best friend, a man named Jonah who is out there somewhere and who gets joy out of toying with a man he'd once called 'brother'. Mac tells them, staring at the wall over the chair Matty sits in, that they'd only met a few times, when he was very young. James had been gone a lot even then, and he'd rarely brought friends around.

Then, around sixteen years ago, James and Walsh's partnership had imploded, and Walsh had gone completely off the rails. He'd turned sides - or had always been rogue right from the start, Mac has never been completely clear on that - and disappeared. It had become beyond a personal vendetta for James. Right from the moment he'd learned the truth, he'd been completely obsessed. It was the reason he'd taken off on Mac's birthday when he'd been just ten, tore around the world chasing after Walsh for eighteen months before finally coming back and throwing himself into DXS with renewed fervor. It was their resources he'd needed, and so he'd advanced his career at the agency with single-minded focus, until he'd been promoted to Director and handed free reign over DXS and every tool at its disposal.

Mac was brought into his father's personal mission to find Walsh as soon as he'd joined DXS after college. That news is enough to grit Riley's teeth even harder, and she's afraid she's going to crack something when she hears what came next, how after the death of Alfred Peña things had kicked up to a new degree of intensity. Mac describes with a renewed tremble in his voice how James had used his first partner and training agent's death to effectively mark the end of his training period, and after that, he'd been in the deep end whether he'd wanted to be there or not.

"For a while there he was just sort of… messing with us," Mac says with a soft, humorless snort. A shiver rolls through his shoulders. Nobody else says a word as he swallows and clears his throat, voice fractionally stronger when he keeps going. "Letting us get almost there, one time we caught him on a security camera and he looked right at it and waved. It drove… It drove dad _wild,_ I never saw him so angry in my life. I think he about passed out when we saw it the first time. Then one time we got a little too close, dad swears up down and sideways he saw Walsh in person, on a bridge in Venice, and it must have spooked him because he disappeared after that, we didn't get a single hint of him for a long time."

It had been, Mac explains, shortly before the infiltration into DXS had been uncovered. Then, with the chaos of that nightmare, and how deep underground Walsh went, no indication of his whereabouts resurfaced until the early days of Jack being onboarded as Mac's new partner. Once the heat died down sufficiently, Walsh must have decided it was time to throw James off permanently, and the way he'd chosen to do that was the death of his son.

Mac's voice, as he explains his theory on the return of a man he'd once been introduced to as 'Uncle Jonah', is stone. Riley swallows a convulsive cry of shock and horror before it can jolt its way out of her chest. Pacing behind the couch, Bozer's not quite so successful, and Mac flinches at the small, frightened noise he makes.

Walsh was more cautious after the close call, taking far fewer chances, and it had made James increasingly frustrated as time went on. Mac explains that there had been a day, early in their partnership, that Jack had come down to where he was working in Whittacker and Tam's lab and asked what puzzle he'd been thinking about. The mission they'd just returned from, he tells Jack directly, though he still doesn't look the man in the eye, his focus landing somewhere around Jack's shoulder, had been one where James thought there was a concrete lead in the area. Mac didn't find anything, James had lectured him about it for fifteen minutes straight before ordering Mac out of his office, and that's what he'd been upset about when Jack found him.

"You were there, in Budapest," Mac tells Riley, gaze skating over the top of her head. "When we went to extract that Canadian engineer, Libby Parker. There was solid intel that Dr. Parker came into contact with Walsh."

"The pictures in the car," interrupts Jack, the first person besides Mac to speak since the story began. "When we were waiting for exfil, that's what you were showing her. You wanted to see if she could pick Walsh out of a lineup. When I asked, you told me it was for a 'side project' and that's what you were working on, wasn't it? Trying to see if she could ID Walsh."

"She couldn't," Mac confirms. He turns his left hand over, the thumb that had been scrubbing at his knuckles now digging deep into his palm. "But she picked out somebody who was a close contact of his, and we got some decent intel from that, so it wasn't a complete failure."

It turns out, Riley comes to understand as Mac keeps talking, growing somewhat hoarse as he forces himself to keep going with obvious effort, that there have been a hundred times, a hundred little times where Walsh had been just around the corner of what they were dealing with and Mac had never told them. Not once had he breathed a word of it. Walsh had been the trump card that had backed up Mac's threat to resign if he'd been forced to carry a gun, and he'd been the reason James had initially wiped Mac's medical file. Jack had overheard the name during that argument, though he'd forgotten it in the haze of the argument he had with Mac immediately afterwards.

Riley can see the guilt in Jack as he remembers this, nodding slowly along. She can't really find it in herself to fault him for it. A lot had gone on that day and in the week following, and they were all juggling so much that it was hard to keep any of it straight. If Mac notices Jack's expression, he doesn't betray so, though she can't imagine she did. For him to have seen the look on Jack's face, he'd have had to be looking at Jack's face, which he isn't doing. He's not looking at any of their faces, and it's this that worries Riley maybe more than anything.

"And then Bosnia happened." Mac sounds exhausted. It makes Riley want to interrupt, to tell him to stop talking, shoo him away into his room to rest or into her car so she can drive them both down to the pier where the only thing they have to worry about is keeping their hair out of their eyes when the sea wind whips through it. She knows she can't, though, knows they have to hear this and somehow also knows that Mac needs to say it, so she purses her mouth to keep any interruptions shut inside and lets him keep going. "Zachary Wright, the kid who died there, the note left with him. Dad was sure that was Walsh."

"I was never allowed access to the debriefs with Agents Luther and Paiz," Matty says. It's clear from a glance around the room that they'd all wanted to interject there, but Matty had been the only one able to corral the words together to actually do so. "When I asked, the Director just said he 'had it handled' and walked out of the room."

"He explicitly ordered me not to tell you anything about it," Mac tells her, though he still doesn't look her in the eye. He's looking down at his own hands, shoulders slumped and chin dipped towards his chest. "It was always… very clear that Walsh wasn't something I was ever allowed to talk about to anyone, but that time he went out of his way to make sure I knew not to say anything to you about it. He interviewed Alicia Paiz and Chanelle Luther himself with a sketch artist, didn't even tell me what came out of that interview. I think he shut me out because I told him he was wrong, and he knew it was true."

"How did you know it wasn't Walsh who'd left the note?" Once again it's Matty who's found both the words and the composure to get them out coherently, and Riley is grateful.

"The way it was written. The name it used." Mac shakes his head. His eyes drift out across the room and out the sliding doors onto the deck. Riley follows his gaze but can't tell what he's looking at, or indeed if he's really looking at anything at all. The look on his face is distant, and she's got the feeling that whatever he's thinking about, it's not here. "The note said 'MacGyver' and Walsh… Walsh always called him Jay. But he wouldn't listen to me, and I'd bet anything that when he was gone for the next week, he was in Sarajevo, mining for anything he could find on Walsh. He didn't tell me what was going on that time before he left. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't, but that's usually what he's doing when he takes off like that."

The sound of a short, tense breath huffed out through gritted teeth and the sharp turn of Bozer's pacing tells Riley exactly how he feels about James MacGyver's habit of taking off. Mac's knee takes up moving again, jolting up and down faster than it had been before. He reminds Riley of a spring coiled tighter and tighter, and she hopes he can get through the rest of whatever he has to say before he coils so tight he snaps.

Luckily, he does. Talking faster and in shorter, clipped sentences that are a far cry from the usual excited ramble Riley has grown fond of hearing when Mac really gets going. He finishes the long, exhausting exhumation of what's been lurking behind and underneath so much more of her time at DXS than she ever could have predicted by circling back to the reason they need to know in the first place. The investigation. Mac confesses that he'd left things out when telling them about his past missions, anything to do with Walsh and the Director's single-minded drive to smoke him out once and for all.

It makes sense, when Riley reflects on it. She remembers going through files with him, watching the odd microexpressions that flickered across his face, the tension in his jaw that came and went around strange pauses and fragmented answers to questions she had the feeling Mac didn't want to address at all. At the time she'd chalked it up to the fraught history he had with partnerships before Jack and the overall stress of helping them investigate her father. Now she knows better and she can see it plain as if she'd known it at the time - the way Mac had been self-editing in real time, censoring and clipping carefully around the edges of what he couldn't tell them.

"But I had to tell you now," Mac says. He sounds tired, speaking in the voice of a man who's just run a marathon or gone days without sleep. Years without rest. "After what happened to you, Matty," his eyes flick up for just a fraction of a moment, making a split second's guilty eye contact for the first time since they've been here in this awful, seemingly endless meeting, "I couldn't stand the thought that I could be keeping something from you guys that could get one of you hurt. No matter who told me to, or- or what my life might look like if I disobeyed."

A heavy silence falls over the house. Bozer's stopped moving, his pacing footsteps stilling behind the couch. There's a tilt to Matty's head that Riley's learned means she's processing a lot of information really quickly. Jack's hands, braced at the edge of the coffee table he's still sitting on, are gripping the wood so hard his knuckles have paled. And Mac… Mac looks like he's about to have a panic attack or simply jump up and run at any moment.

"What does he look like?" Riley asks, the question sudden and unexpected even to herself. She couldn't help it. Sitting there while the specter of a shattered partnership and an obsession crushing the air out of every pair of lungs in the room just wasn't an option any longer. She had to do _something,_ and this is the first thing she'd thought of. "I mean, we should probably know who it is we're dealing with, right?"

Nodding, Mac separates his hands with some effort. One goes to the back of his neck, yanking momentarily at the ends of his hair, the other covering his eyes. Still nodding, he says, "Right. Yeah, just- Just a minute." In a moment, he's up and then he's gone, and the space left behind where he'd been sitting beside her yawns loud and empty.

If he hadn't been given the excuse to leave, even just for the length of time it takes to retrieve something from his room, Mac doesn't know what he would have done. Sitting there in the living room, it had been getting harder and harder to keep any amount of composure at all. Maybe Riley had picked up on it, and that's why she'd intervened, but whatever the reason, Mac is relieved beyond words. His chest catches around breaths that burn his throat as he opens his closet, craning his neck towards a top shelf he rarely looks at.

Focusing on the object he's looking for is good. It gives him a direction for the frenetic energy buzzing in his fingertips, the attention that would otherwise go to the question rattling around his head on a loop.

_What did I do? What did I do? What did I do?_

There's a box, high up on that shelf, shoved off towards the corner where he hasn't touched it in months if not longer. Pulling it forward and tipping it carefully down so he can reach it without it toppling and spilling its contents everywhere, Mac gingerly sets it down on his bed. There's not much in it, which makes locating what he's looking for simple and quick. Before taking off back to the living room, Mac allows himself a moment to stand there alone and look at it, a slightly faded rectangle of stiff, glossy paper.

It's a picture from a long time ago, one Mac could never really explain why he'd saved. James doesn't know he has it, and Mac shudders to think of the reaction he'd have if he ever found out. It's the only photo he's ever seen of his father and his partner, from before things had gone so unbelievably wrong. There's writing on the back that he glances at, words he's read a hundred times over in a handwriting he doesn't recognize but knows the owner of thanks to one three letter clue, a nickname he's never heard of anyone else ever using.

_Jay & Jonah,_ it reads, ballpoint pen that's nearly worn completely through in the loops of the twin J's where the scratch of the ink had lightened off the page somewhat, _Cliff's retirement, '93._

On the front are two men, one lean-built with a mop of curly, dark blond hair, hand slightly blurred where it was captured mid-grab onto the fabric of the second, taller and stockier man's shirt. There's an arm slung around his neck in a friendly kind of half-hug, half-headlock, and Mac can see the moment as if he'd been there: someone calling out for their attention, Jonah pulling James over with him with an exuberance matching the wide grin on his square-jawed face, nearly knocking him off balance in the process. The people in that picture are young, and happy, and it makes Mac sick to look at them.

Walking back out into the living room and sitting back down on the couch, the picture in Mac's hands feels as delicate and friable, as lethal as any bomb he's ever handled. There's some low conversation happening between Jack and Matty that pauses when he returns but resumes as he hands the photo to Riley. She looks at it briefly, eyes scanning the image, then passes it off to Bozer, standing behind the couch by her shoulder.

The talking continues, fuzzing out for a moment as the rush of his own pulse surges in Mac's ears, and before he's realized what he's doing consciously enough to stop it, he's reached out and grabbed onto Riley's hand. The static in his head doesn't go away - if anything it surges fractionally louder - and so instead of letting go, Mac holds on tighter. It feels almost like he's trying to tell her something that he can't even understand himself, shaking fingers digging into the back of her hand until he's worried he might be hurting her. Except that when he goes to relax, to pry his hand away, she won't let him. When Mac tries to loosen his grip, Riley tightens hers, and he loves her for it.

In that moment, Mac loves her so much it feels like his heart is crushed there between their hands, fingers tangled through vessels and ventricles. He's still trying to get used to this kind of love, alive and writhing and just short of agony. Before he'd thought it was just something about Bozer that sparked it in him in flashes. Some kind of inexplicable connection between childhood friends who've known each other so long that there's a version of themselves nobody else ever _will_ know. Now, he thinks it's something else, something he's slowly mapping the shape of with cautious, reaching hands.

The picture is back in his possession now after making its rounds of the room, held up delicately as if he thinks it might blow away into dust if too harshly disturbed. Mac has held it just like this a dozen times over, studied it in the light, turned it to the side hoping maybe a different angle would turn up what he's looking for there. It's something in his father's face he's always been trying to find, though without being quite sure what it is.

Maybe what he's looking for is that love, the love he's just, in the split second between his pulse and Riley's where their wrists are pressed hard together, named _family._ Mac has imagined that he's seen it there before, squinting at this picture of James and his partner, has seen it before as well in a handful of old pictures the few times he's been able to look at them.

Pictures of James with Mac's mother, Ellen, before her death, the odd photo of James as a child with his own parents, in this lone surviving picture of James and Jonah Walsh. Mac's looked for love in them and thinks he's found it, and wonders now what it says that he's never seen the shine in James's face in those pictures anywhere in his own memory.

It's a sharp, cruel thought - which one of them had it been that caused the change? Had it been James, or had it been something about Mac himself? He either can't or doesn't want to find the answer.

So absorbed is he in the picture, in all the complicated and messy things it kicks up in his chest, that Mac doesn't see the hand until it's fully entered his vision. It arrives with the looming presence of someone leaning over the back of the couch by the shoulder on the opposite side of where Riley sits, and Mac flinches, chin jagging to the side and breath hitching.

Jack, who has to have noticed, doesn't say anything about the flinch. What he does is touch Mac's shoulder, his hand strong and steady in a stark contrast to the way Mac feels like he's made of tissue paper, about to tear into tiny pieces or just flutter away. Jack holds onto his shoulder, thumb brushing the scar with the casual ease of having done it now a dozen times over, and looks past Mac down at the picture.

"Looks like a completely different person, huh?"

Mac looks at it too, the printed copy of a face he's supposed to know almost as well as his own, and says, "I barely recognize him."

It's true. Whoever the man in that photo is, the one with his father's youthful face broken out in that wide, bright smile, a handful of Jonah Walsh's t-shirt grabbed in the world's least antagonistic fist to keep upright in that off-balance sideways hug… Whoever he is, or was, or might have been, Mac is sure they've never met. He leans slightly back, pressing into the steady warmth of Jack's hand. It doesn't move, the hold on him tightening just a fraction.

When Mac lurches suddenly forward, Jack lets him go easily. Mac holds the picture out to Matty, unsure why he's doing it but knowing with an abrupt certainty that he can't have it in his possession for a moment longer.

"You should have this," he tells her, voice loud and sharp in his own ears. "Take it, put it in your file on him or something, but just, please-"

Getting out of her chair and crossing the short space separating them, Matty takes the picture without question. "Thank you," she says, tucking it away in a pocket of the bag she'd shown up with. As soon as it's out of sight, something in Mac's chest eases slightly. Before he can return to his seat, though, Matty's hand closes around his wrist, keeping him there. "Thank you," she repeats intently. "I can't imagine how hard it was to tell us all of that.

Mac doesn't answer. He stares down at the floor, feeling her grip on his arm at once an anchor and a lifeline.

"You said that if we hated you for not telling us this before, we'd be right to," Matty says, referring back to the beginning of his confession, something that feels to Mac like it had happened hours ago. His face feels hot and he chokes on trying to respond, before she moves forward and relieves him of the effort, leaving no room for debate in her verdict. "I want to be very clear with you right now that there is no way any person in this room would have hated you for that. And if we had, we would most certainly not have been _right_ to."

A murmur of agreement sweeps around the room. Mac doesn't know what to do, what to say. He doesn't know if he could move if he tried.

Matty isn't done yet. She squeezes his wrist gently and says, "You've been braver than you ever should have had to be, and I think I speak for all of us when I say I am so proud of you. Whatever comes next, whatever consequences you might see for the decision you made today, for _any_ of this, I promise you're not going to face them alone. We'll figure it out, and we'll do it together, but I need you to believe me, and _trust_ us. Okay?"

Looking behind him, Mac sees that Bozer's finally sat down, now on the couch between Jack and Riley. They sit in a row now, looking at him with identical determined expressions. Mac has spent most of his life learning, for one reason or another, how to lie and get away with it and, in turn, how to recognize it in others. Direct, guileless honesty stares back at him from all three of them. There's not a hint of an indication that any of them have a moment's hesitation or regret in cosigning what Matty has said. Closing his eyes and burning the image into his mind, Mac breathes in deep. His lungs expand easily and without a fight.

It feels like emerging from a thick smoke out into clean, clear air.

"Okay."


End file.
